Re: Suggestion on Power Supply? Movie

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Stephen Conner by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <steve-at-scopeboy-dot-com>



>>I would think that the smaller cap/610BPS
>>combo would lead to many purple short streamers
>>dancing all around the toroid. High voltage
>>because the smaller caps charge up real
>>fast, but not much amperage in each discharge
>>enough to penetrate any significant length of air.
>>But plenty of them!

Both my coils have small caps and run at silly high BPS. The big one has a 
9.4nF MMC cap (DC resonant charged to 20kV) and runs at 500bps. It produces 
just one streamer about 30" to 33" long. This is not as long as one would 
expect from the 800W power input. However it is very bright, and forks and 
dances around in a pretty scary fashion.

I assume this is because the streamer grows over the course of several 
bangs and at each bang it has the option to keep going straight ahead, or 
change direction, or fork. By the same reasoning I reckon that a bigger cap 
will produce streamers that are longer, straighter, and probably dimmer, 
for a given power input.

This leads me to believe that if I installed a bigger cap, I'd probably hit 
the light fitting on the basement ceiling and fry it, or more likely, just 
zap my strike rail all the time. So I chose to stick with 9.4nF.

Here is a short quicktime movie that I found lying about my hard disk (note 
I used a breakout point for this one) The big bright arc to ground at the 
end is 30"

http://www.scopeboy-dot-com/tesla/teslatwo.mov 1.4MB 10 secs long

Steve C.