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First light!




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From:  Barton B. Anderson [SMTP:mopar-at-mn.uswest-dot-net]
Sent:  Monday, March 23, 1998 9:49 PM
To:  Tesla List
Subject:  First light!

Hey guys,
Finally, finally, finally, BEAUTIFUL BLUE HOT
ARCS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At noon I bought a 20A variac ($10)  for the purpose of
using DC's idea of current limiting. Later in the day, I
went into the model shop and pulled the core from the
casing (this variac was not epoxied to the case) and cut
a slot through the core with a gravity band saw. The
original wiring was untouched. I then glued in the slot,
two insulators (saw blade thick). Cleaned it up, put it
back together and brought it home tonight.

Using the variac as is, I put the variac in series with
the input to the pole pig and set up a jacabs ladder.
The sparks were quite fat a climbed nicely up the
ladder. I had done this before but with halogen bulbs
which had wimpy little arcs. I knew there was plenty of
juice to give the coil a first test.

I removed all the gas cans and flammables outside of the
garage. I set up the coil and made the connections. I
fired up the rotary gap and began increasing the voltage
at the control box. To my amazement, hot blue arcs fired
off the toroid right into the roof of the ceiling in my
garage. I almost couldn't believe it. It fired with
about 5kv input (rotary gaps are pretty close), much
sooner than I expected. The adrenaline rush was intense!
The rotary gap was reasonably loud and had white crisp
arcs firing away. I shut it down and didn't let it run
but for a few seconds as the blue arcs were firing into
the ceiling which was only a couple feet above the
toroid, and my pc equipment was in the room just above
the coil (still works apparently). I guess I didn't
expect it to take off with such power. I figured I would
probably have to make some gap adjustments before I
would get the coil to arc off the toroid. Man I'm
excited!!!

Well, I owe a whole lotta people a BIG THANK YOU! So Ed,
Bert, DC, Malcolm, Charles, Jim, Chip, and the whole
Tesla List gang, thank you for all your support. I don't
think I would have accomplished this if it wasn't for
this great list and great bunch of coilers.

This weekend I plan to begin tuning/gapping the coil for
optimum spark length. I may need to run it outside if
(it's dry and not windy) to do this. May just be too
much coil for this little garage. As soon as things are
in "good working order" I'll take some pics and post the
specs.

Thanks again everyone,
Bart (spark'in in Minnesota!)