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Nathan's Saga Update...



Terry,and All,

My kudos as well to the USPS. Very impressive delivery.
The cap told me how well it worked by giving me a little jolt to my 
outstreched finger when I didn't quite short it well enough... (weren't 
those resistors supposed to do that? or did I not wait long enough for them 
to do their job?) It was a tiny zap, anyway.

I will definitely keep the cap, as it is an improvement from before.  
Unfortunately, it didn't quite solve all my problems. :-(

I only ran it with the static gap today, just to be nice to my newest 
investment, ;-) and spark length grew to about 10".  Then I started having 
transformer problems.  It must just be their time to go, I guess.

I blew two more secondary windings on those darn franceformers.  One of them 
came undone where the actual last secondary winding came out to meet the 
wire I attached, and started the left over tar on fire, then burned out 
completely.

Then I mixed and matched the working secondaries and primaries that I had 
left from the two identical trannies I rebuilt, and after about 10 sec. the 
other secondary started smoking.

I still havn't gotten any discharge into the air. Only to my grounded 
lineman's hook.

Now I have been running it with my 15/60 that works and is still potted in 
tar, (this should be resonant with my new cap)  and it runs OK on about 6 RQ 
gap sections (spaced about 0.03", but if I go more than that, the gaps 
periodically stop firing.  Performance is definitely increased with each gap 
I add, but the more gaps, the less consistently the gap fires.

I have been checking continuity all over the grounds and stuff, and they are 
all fine. I just added two more turns to the primary to try to get that 
tuned, but I can't do any real testing until I figure out why the gap stops 
firing.  I really need a power supply I can count on not to burn itself out.

Hey, you guys with rotaries, I just had something funny happen. I run two 
extension cords zip tied together to run two seperate 120V lines out to the 
coil, one is for the trannies, the other for my rotary gap.  This is so I 
can get the rotary up to speed before energizing the coil.

Since I did not use the rotary today, I did not plug in the cord that goes 
to that. I still had it connected on the frame of the coil where I have the 
motor connectors.

I soon found that I am inducing current into the motor windings, because the 
plug in at the other end of the cord where I was started getting corona 
discharge and melting itself to the carpet.

So I am pretty sure I'm getting induction to the motor- but does anybody 
else have experience with this? I havn't noticed any change when I use the 
rotary (At least when my power supplies were reliable enough to run the 
coil). Does anybody else have problems with induction of current into their 
motor windings?

I tried running it with my old toroid, a 3" by 14" foil taped dryer duct.  
It got no noticable improvement, but the streamer was very stringy, not so 
crackly and jagged like the other ones.

The difference between the 15/30 and the 15/60 is very noticeable. There is 
not much of a distance increase, but the 60 gets much hotter, louder, and 
robust discharge than the 30 does.  When I used the rotary before, though, 
loudness and brightness of the gap increased dramatically and coil ouput was 
longer, although still weak.

When I tried the coil on 16 turns instead of 15 the primary, the output got 
slightly longer, although at that point the spark gap was firing quite 
sporadically.

I havn't done anything else this evening, but will hope to hear some input 
soon from you guys out there, so you can help me procrastinate my chemistry 
lab writeup some more this weekend. ;-)

Thanks,
Nathan

PS. Are any of you experienced in Tesla Coil Exorcisms? I really think I 
should get some of these evil demons out of my coil...  They're the best 
explanation I have for the poor performance now!

Hopefully I will go to my dad's office and scan in some pictures soon so you 
people can see my actual coil, and maybe that will help you help me. -N


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