my first light!!

["Pholp Smiff" <kawanze-at-hotmail-dot-com> (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>)]

The one i was off work, home from school, and finally finished my tesla 
coil, it started raining and raining and lightning and raining. I was 
anxious to get it up, that's all i was thinking about all day at school (im 
only 16). So i still went out, against my better judgement. Put everything 
on top of trashcans (to keep it off the ground) and made little umbrellas 
for all the parts out of spare polyethylene i never used and then, finally 
put my 24" diameter toroid on top. I called my friend and had him come over. 
I got everything situated and double checked all connections (by this time 
the rain was starting to let up) and told my friend to throw the switch and 
here's what happened:

Nothing at all; i checked the outlet with my multimeter and found it was 
dead. So i got out the old 100 ft extension cord and plugged it in 
elsewhere. The spark gap turned white and started buzzing loud, but there 
was no breakout whatsoever. My coil was designed for 12kv-at-60ma but i was 
running it at 30ma, because i didn't have enough capacitance. I took off my 
24"(*6") toroid, unscrewing the bolts and complex connection i engineered. I 
took a smaller one i made earlier, 4 inch by 20 inches and rigged it on with 
electrical tape and flicked the switch, nothing at all. I was beginning to 
think there was a break in my secondary or somehting disastrous like that. I 
took off the toroid and through it like a frisbee. I went inside searching 
desperately for anything that would work. I saw a small nerf ball. I grabbed 
it and crumpled some aluminum foil around it and ran outside. I just jammed 
this on the bolt up top then electrical taped the wire onto it. I walked 
once again slowly over to the outlet to plug it in, already knowing this 
wouldn't work. And then turned around to look at the coil and there were 
bright blue sparks going all over the place!
it looked like a giant (2 foot diameter) plasma ball. I let it run and 
watched the sparks dance all over the sphere for about 5 minutes, then i 
heard a loud *POP* and there was a brilliant orange flash and a flaming 
piece of trash flew out from underneith and landed right next to me.. it was 
half a capacitor, still smoking, oil dripping off of it. The sparks shrunk 
to about half size and i decided it would be best to turn it off right then 
before something else bad happened.
And so i went inside and put it all away.

I hope i didn't bore you too much. Im just excited and surprised that it 
worked! about 8" sparks with a coil designed to run at twice the power. and 
im glad i finished it when i did... just in time for science fair >)