Newbie

[Erthwin-at-aol-dot-com (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>)]

Hello all, this is my first post here and it's sort of a "hello I'm here" 
announcement. Anyway I got started on this whole Tesla Coil bit a few months 
ago when I was in my local electronic surplus store looking for a laser power 
suply and the guy behind the counter showed me the TC that the store's owner 
had built, I asked how it was built and he proceeded to give me instructions 
to build a TC from the moron's point of view *lol* He basically told me to 
just slap together some big capacitors a transformer and a couple of coils 
and plug the thing in. Since I had a little prior knowledge of highvoltage 
systems (albeit a small prior knowledge) I correctly assumed there was a 
little more to it. I just never realized how much more.......to give you an 
idea I'll post the original specs of my coil (it didn't work obviously and is 
what led me to gather some real info on TCs)

Transformer: 10Kv OBIT (so far so good)
Spark gap: a rather small and extrememly rough conglomeration of wires that 
approximated a jacob's ladder (oops, there's the first mistake *lol*)
Capacitor: .075uF 250v mica cap (what the heck was I thinking there?)
Primary: five turns of 8awg wire wrapped around a 7" dia pvc pipe in a 
helical config (that's gonna do a lot...)
Secondary: 4" by 16" wrapped with 18awg bell wire (one of only two parts 
still on my coil)
Toroid: metal mixing bowl (eventually abandoned out of sheer anoyance)

after months of reading web pages gathering formulas and working out the 
problems I am now very close to making my first working coil (no thanks to 
the guy behind the counter that got me started on this whole thing) ...yes 
you heard right, it still doesn't work. This is mainly due to my tendency to 
think I can fix it without any help, that lasted for the majority of the 
months I have been working on the coil and I just now started with the true 
calculations. I still have problems but at least now I know how to fix them 
:) Here are my current specs:

Transformer: still the good old 10kv OBIT which btw puts out .023 amps
Spark gap: I used the Richard Quick static airblown that uses an air 
compressor instead of a fan
Capacitor: two 5Kv .0003uF mica caps in series (this is my bigest problem at 
the moment, a value of .00015uF is far to small to power my coil, the 
transformer can handle up to .0061 which is what I am in the process of 
looking for)
Primary: 4 turns of 1/2" refrigeration tubing wound in a flat spiral (this is 
my second problem, I need to get 1/4" tubing and up the turns to around 
twelve)
Toroid: none at the moment, I plan on using aluminum drier hose though, will 
that work well?

Left, left I hadda good brain but it left...
---Daniel Freas