RE: There is no 'best ' wire size, all things are equal.

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

Original poster: "John H. Couture by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <couturejh-at-worldnet.att-dot-net>


Albert -

You have proven that successful Tesla coils can be designed and built
without computers and that is how they have been built for almost a hundred
years. So why use a computer program?

There are many reasons for using a computer program but I like to use it for
"what if" answers. You can obtain the answer much faster compared to using
manual calculations. Many more design possibilities can now be explored to
make better coils. I have endevored to make the JHCTES programs produce the
maximum amount of output information with the minimum number of carefully
selected inputs to facilitate these new designs.

You are correct in saying that it takes a little amount of horse sense to
get useful data out of the program. I started working on my programs over 10
years ago and thought by now there would be a ton of TC programs on the
market. However, I admit it is much more fun making the sparks than trying
to get a program to work without bugs. There is much more work to be done to
improve TC programming and some day a coiler will bring out the super TC
program. Will that take all the fun out of coiling?

John Couture

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-----Original Message-----
From: Tesla list [mailto:tesla-at-pupman-dot-com]
Sent: Sunday, December 31, 2000 11:04 AM
To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
Subject: There is no 'best ' wire size, all things are equal.


Original poster: "Albert Hassick by way of Terry Fritz
<twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <uncadoc-at-juno-dot-com>

Hi Chris, John.   The 5" tall secondary tale that John told really hit
home. You can tweak your Tesla program and come up with the ultimate 5"
tall coil with super fine wire that the P.C. program says will work just
dandy.  Thanks John, for the tongue in cheek!   And you hit the nail
right on the head!  Whoa, now for a little common horse sense.  Computers
can do many things, but they are only as good as the individual whom sits
next to them pounding the keyboard to come up with a great and powerful
coil.  The computer design aids are fun to play with and I lately enjoy
toying with them now that I am finally figuring out how to use this darn
computer of mine for anything more than e-mail.  And mostly to see if the
computer program could tell me why our four undesigned coils work so
well.  But we never ever used any computer design parameters from any
program to design any of our coils.  And they all work great.  We used
what we could get and as cheap as we could get it. All this from an old
Lindsay book for $7.00 by R.A.Ford. The best one yet is our fourth coil
with #14ga. wire (500 foot spool) and complete secondary cost of only
$30.00.  It works beyond our wildest dreams.  We wound it just to see
what would happen, and there are plenty of sparks and corona field
happening from this coil which we have affectionately dubbed "Fat Boy"
cause it is short and fat and it makes gigantic arcs. And all this with
only a two turn primary coil. There is nothing like hands on and
experimentation to really delve deep into the Tesla coiling hobby.  Don't
get me wrong now, the computer is a tool, and a good one too. But all
tools ultimately need to come under the guiding hand of us mere humans as
we contemplate the "dirt factor".  Yep, actually getting some dirt under
our fingernails.  Yikes!     Al.

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