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well, this is interesting



Subject:  well, this is interesting
  Date:   Sat, 3 May 97 05:02:48 UT
  From:   "William Noble" <William_B_Noble-at-MSN.COM>
    To:  "Tesla List" <tesla-at-poodle.pupman-dot-com>


well, I learned a few things tonite - maybe even some make sense.  I
added 
some capacitance to my new coil - I started from .001 mica and added a
.001 
14.5KV capacitor made by Plastic Capacitor company (it's about 1"
diameter, 8 
inches long, encased in glass) - sparks went from dinky little 3 inch
sparks 
to really nice looking 18 inch sparks with lots of forking.  So, adding 
capacitance is good, and the little Plastic Capacitor unit is good too -
it 
warmed up just a bit in a 20 to 30 sec run (about as long as I can run
with my 
half done RQ spark gap with no fan) - it felt like it raised up about 5 
degrees or so.

I also learned that the toilet float I used for a top capacitor (a
plastic one 
with some aluminum foil wrapped around it) keeps a charge - I got a
small 
shock when I went to dismantle the coil - I don't quite understand this
since 
I thought it would be grounded through the secondary (the low side of
which is 
grounded), but the connections were't the best, so maybe there was an
open 
circuit???

What I don't understand is the following - when I doubled the tank 
capacitance, I would have thought I would halve the tank inductance to
keep LC 
about constant and maintain resonance with the secondary.  But I found
that 
with .002 uf it was best on turn 13 (I only have 14 total turns on a 1/4
inch 
{50 ft} tubing flat spiral primary), and with just the .001 mica
capacitor it 
seemed to like fewer turns - my notes say that with the same secondary 
configuration (toilet float on top, etc) I got best performace at turn
8, and 
with no top capacitance, best was at turn 13.  does this make any
sense???

And, can I expect still better performance by adding more primary 
capacitance?? (input xformer is 15KV 30 ma neon) - it would seem so....