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RE: Coil Failure



>Original Poster: Christopher Michaelis <cmichael-at-xmission-dot-com> 
>
>I'm getting a bit put out - my coil doesn't give even 6" sparks. Here are
>my problems:
>
>I'm using a 15000kva 30ma neon, with salt water caps (not tinfoil covered,
>but put in salt water with copper tubes out of top). I've got 7 spark gaps
>of 1/4" each, using copper tubing that's been hammered flat. Primary is 7
>turns 1/4" copper wire, and the secondary is 15" of 24 guage wire.
>
>I'm getting very thin, frail sparks off of the top, and I'm getting a
>MASSIVE show inside of the capacitor box -- strange stuff, looks about like
>about 6 coils discharging at once.
>
>Any suggestions?
>
>Christopher Michaelis

To get the most out of SW caps you need to minimize the resistance to the
plates.  This means that the exteriors of the bottles must be foil
covered, with as good a wire connection to the foil as possible.  The
same would apply to the interiors too, except that it's topologically
next to impossible to do that.

Are your 7 spark gaps wired in series?  If your total gap is 7x0.25",
that's WAYYYY to wide, like by a factor of 7.  The tubing should not be
flattened - you want the tubes to arc at a point with a large radius.

If you really are using a 7x0.25" wide gap, you're probably not getting
the gap to arc at all, and instead, your caps are ringing up to some
frightful voltage and putting on their own light show - very bad for them
and the transformer.

There's not enough information here to tell if you are in tune, but
first, work on that gap.  There's plenty of info on the web on how to
build static cylinder gaps, aka RQ/TCBOR gaps.

Gary Lau
Waltham, MA USA