First Light in Oz and topload question

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

Original poster: "Stacy Gillett by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <sgillett-at-hotmail-dot-com>

Hello all,

I posted here a few months back with some questions before I started 
building my first coil, and fired it up for the first time tonight.

Specs are:

* 15kv/30ma NST

* safety gap for protection (set so that it barely doesn't fire with only 
the trannie connected)

* RQ/TCBOR gap with 11 electrodes of 1 1/4" dia x 3" long copper tubes  
(each gap spaced at 0.028") plus microwave oven fan for cooling

* 8 x 12oz beer bottles for capacitor (approx 6nf)

* 14 turn flat primary with 0.375" turn-turn spacing and 7" inner diameter 
(wound with insulated 5AWG wire)

* 4" x 20" secondary wound with approx 700 turns of 22AWG magnet wire
(secondary Fres is about 300kHz with the toroid on top)

* 4.5" x 10" toroid (florists' foam sanded into toroidal shape then wrapped 
with Al tape)

Using a breakout point on the toroid, tapping into the 9th turn on the 
primary gave the best sparks (around 10" or 11" long... though still a bit 
shorter than I expected).  However, what surprised me was that there was 
absolutely ZERO breakout without the breakout point attached (even though I 
thought that my topload was relatively small and sized correctly for my 
charging circuit).  Does anyone have any ideas as to why this would be the 
case?

Also, I found that running with all 10 gaps caused the safety gap to fire 
every few seconds... reducing this to 9 gaps solved this problem (I don't 
fancy burning up my trannie!)

Next step from here... maybe put another 15/30 in parallel and add another 8 
beer bottles (MMC is out of my price range at the moment)... this might fix 
the breakout problem.  A MOT doubler supply might be worth a go as well...

Thanks again to all who post on this list... I don't know how I would have 
built my coil without the information in the Pupman archives !

Stacy Gillett
Victoria, Australia

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