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RE: Dramatic Performance Drop After 5 Seconds?


Hi Adam & All,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tesla List [mailto:tesla-at-pupman-dot-com]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2000 8:58 AM
> To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
> Subject: Re: Dramatic Performance Drop After 5 Seconds?
> 
> 
> Original Poster: "Adam" <adamsmith-at-mediaone-dot-net> 
> 
> > Original Poster: "William Parn" <parn-at-fgm-dot-com>
> > 
> > 
> > Greets All,
> > 
> > My coil when at 3/4 to full power will run really nice for
> > 1-5 seconds and all the sudden the 12" - 14" streamers turn
> > into little 1/2" streamers, and the sound changes to a real
> > tinny sound.  If I wait a few minutes and turn back on, it
> > repeats.
> > 
> > I cleaned and checked to spark gap really well and the same
> > thing still happens.
> 
> "Fizzle out" is a common problem with medium power coils, 
> particularly ones
> where the spark gap design is not adequate for the power being used.
> 
> I just responded to a post from Ron West asking pretty much the 
> same thing.
> I've seen fizzle-out happen under two conditions:
> 
>     1. Static gap not being ventilated actively enough, so that ions
>        and metal vapor are lingering and preventing quenching.  This
>        can happen very, very quickly, and I'd bet it's the cause. In
>        severe cases, the gap arc will actually start to look more like a
>        jacob's ladder flame than the correct blue-white welding-spark
>        appearance.  This is a good clue that you're reaching power levels
>        where a rotary gap would work best.

This sounds like it could be it, the performance before this happens
is at a peak I have never seen out of it.  Thanks to the MMC (Terry) and
WinTesla (?? need to send my $20 in) I was able to determine I needed 
less primary capacitance and more primary coil which I spliced in, and
the nice mini toroid (John).  Not to mention all the answers from all
on this list.  I will start working on turning my static gap into a
air blasted gap and let everyone know how it goes.  This might be a 
really good way to get the O3 and other toxins out of the garage
during operation as well.

> 
>     2. Caps warm up and change the tank frequency, detuning the coil. If
>        your MMC gets warm in a few seconds, it's not designed
>        properly.  I suspect this is not the case, but it's worth
>        feeling the temperature after a run to rule this out.

This is a good sign.  The caps are not warm at all after this
happens.

> 
> Either of these can happen very quickly, or very slowly, depending on the
> degree of severity of the problem.
> 
> -Adam
> adamsmith-at-mediaone-dot-net
> 
> 

Many Thanks,
Bill Parn