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Tesla coil questions

Hi everyone,

This is originally a set of queries  concerning tesla coils that I have been
trying to send to Richard Quick but I have been unable to get in contact with
him so I'll post the questions here and maybe Richard or someone will be able
to answer for me. Cheers!


That Tesla coil that I made using beer bottles and salt water is going great-
I'm getting about 9-10 inches of spark off it. I'm trying to get the
materials together at the moment to make a coil like in your first video
where you drive a 6 inch coil using just two 15kv 30 mA neons and you get
Massive sparks coming off it.
I have just bought the 6 inch plastic pipe for it - it is grey stormwater
pipe,not schedule 40 but it is a bit thicker than the usual pvc downpipe used
in houses. Do you think that this will be ok? I have just seen your post on
Chip's email about plastic pipes for Tesla coils- how do you bake your pipe
to drive out moisture- do you use a blow dryer or what?

I cant locate any aluminium flashing over here but I can get copper flashing
( 12 inches wide and 0.08mm thick (what you would call about 3 mils thick)- a
bit thinner than the 10mil aluminium flashing you use over there). Do you
think that it will be ok for making the capacitor with?

Looking at your coil in the video it seems to be about 24 inches high but I'm
not sure of that or what kind of wire you used to wind it or how many turns
you wound. Also what is the total length of the 6 inch plastic pipe
(including the unwound length)?

Also ( sorry about all these questions!) in a posting you put on fidonet
about making polythene capacitors written by Bert Pool he mentions that it is
much better to use multiple polythene sheets to prevent breakdown in case of
a bad patch on the polythene. I notice that in one of your postings you say
that multiple sheets affect the efficiency of the capacitor. Do you think
that I should just use a single or multiple sheets if I want to get spark
like in your video?

Thanks!

Best Regards,
Mark


-- Mark
       _/_/_/   _/_/_/_/       Mark Conway
      _/    _/    _/          Deep Thought BBS, Auckland, New Zealand
     _/    _/    _/          A FirstClass(tm) Macintosh GUI BBS
    _/_/_/      _/          Internet: mconway-at-deepthnk.kiwi.gen.nz