I never thought about running mine in parallel. I used to run a two gap RSG with the circular shorting bar, but now run with four gaps, one stationary gap on either side of the flying electrodes, with a shorting bar across the back two stationaries. That's four gaps that have to line up all in series, and it's never been a problem, as far as I can hear, or firing my static emergency gap. I've played with varying the distances, and even tried a static vacuum gap in series with that. Unfortunately, I never documented which seemed to work better. I may try the parallel setup, as the reason I added a series gap was to try and minimize the "trailing" sparks.
________________________________
From: Phil <pip@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: 'Tesla Coil Mailing List' <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2014 5:08 PM
Subject: Re: [TCML] Number of stationary electrodes & gap spacing in RSG
That's interesting David. Funnily enough I was talking with the other UK coiler I run with, over that very issue the other day - one pair or two pairs of stationary gaps.
Without any empirical knowledge of two parallel pairs (4 electrodes) I felt that if the stationary gaps were in parallel (with the aim of sharing the current / heat burden) then maybe the stationeries would run cooler.
I reasoned that only one pair will ever fire at one time, as the gaps would need the machining tolerances of NASA, to both coincide together for a discharge that is measured in mere millionths of a second. So assuming the workload evens out between them, they would each do half the work.
(If the gaps were in series for quenching assistance with a conductive band around the rotor then obviously it's a different matter - tried that once, but had other issues.)
If my parallel thinking was correct the flying electrodes would still only be seeing the same amount of firings though, be it with one stationary pair or the other pair.
Your experiences now make me think my reasoning is wrong though, as only both pairs of stationeries firing together could cause the overheating, by the reasoning you mention - they are firing twice as much.
The decreased performance of yours could of course have been down to quenching issues from the (then) overheated electrodes?
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