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Re: First big magnifier run




<< monster snip 
>What was absolutely incredible during this "conventional coil" attempt is
 >that we had some extremely hot, violent arcs from the toroid down to the
 >primary.  Sometimes, but not every time when this happened, we got 23 inch
>flashovers from the bottom of the primary to the concrete driveway!  We have
 >the entire coil assembly sitting on top of 22 inch tall porcelain
>insulators, and the primary arced all the way to the concrete, jumping
>AROUND a 3/8 inch copper line run straight to my water main. I am still
>stunned at seeing this.  I repeatedly watched this frame-by-frame on video,
>and it is weird.  Apparently there is ground, and then there is ground.  My
 >main ground is 3/8 copper tubing screwed directly to a brass water faucet
on
>the front of the house.  The faucet is connected to a copper water line
>which immediately runs 30 feet under the yard to the water meter, and from
>there to the water main under the street. I dug up a section of the line
 >from the meter to the house to make sure it was copper before I ever used
it
 >as my coil ground.  I figure 30 feet of buried copper line connected to a
>buried water main is a damn good ground, so why would a strike to my
 >concrete driveway just ignore a copper ground line connected to this superb
 >ground?  The arc had to bypass the best ground I can make and instead opted
> for some crummy concrete.  I know the copper water pipe ground is adequate,
>as my coil is performing quite well. Those 23 inch strikes to the driveway
> passed within one inch of my ground and absolutely ignored it.  
  >>king-sized snip

Bert Pool,

Great preliminary results with that Maggy!  I can suggest two possibilities
for why the spark missed the pipe.  1) the concrete is a bigger target, and
the sparks and charged fields may not "see" the small pipe.  2) (and maybe
more likely), TC sparks develop their length by the "growing" principle.
 Bylund had done some work with this using his solid state coil, and he found
that certain conditions favor the production of sparks that do not "go for
ground", but instead have a mind of their own, so to speak.  I think it was
his conjecture that it's very different than a DC spark, in the sense that
the voltage is much lower for the distance jumped than would be expected when
compared with DC spark jumping distances.  

When the spark is first formed, it is short and cannot  reach the pipe or
ground or anything, therefore its direction of propagation is random.  From
the tip of the spark, the spark then grows longer from the continuing power
input to the system, but again, the added amount of spark is weak, too weak
to reach any target, again its direction is random.  This random growing
continues until the spark IS long enough to reach something, but what it
reaches is random due to the gradual, incremental increase in the spark
length.
Comments welcomed.
 
Looking forward to full power results!

John Freau