help: coil won't "stay on"

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

Original poster: "Pholp Smiff by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <kawanze-at-hotmail-dot-com>




I built a neat little coil powered by two <mailto:12kv-at-30ma>12kv-at-30ma transco
transformers, i have all the other components built to those specifications. I
just finished constructing a better torroid for it (it may be worth noting that
the topload is slightly larger than the old one, and it is closer to the top of
the secondary than the old one)and when i go to turn it on i'll get perhaps two
large arcs, and then it will just turn off. I've noticed a *click* sort of
sound from the transformers that occurs just as the coil turns off. Is there
some sort of safety mechanism inside these that will cause this effect? If i
just leave off the secondary and topload completely i could pretty much run it
indefinately with no problems of that sort. Oh yeah, another thing that's kinda
different about my coil is rather than having a ground, i just directly
connected the primary to secondary, because im lazy.
 
I also have another problem. Sometimes when my coil is running (Well before it
would just SHUT OFF), it would be shooting out 4 foot
arcs/sparks/streamers/whatever and be nice and loud, then suddenly go quiet and
only spit out purple fuzz around the topload. This problem seems to be
independent of the first, could it perhaps be tuning? or the height from
topload to base - or base to secondary windings? What's puzzling is how it will
be running great and then suddenly give me whimpy output. It almost seems like
a wire comes loose or something.
 
 
Thanks for you help,
Phillip Smith
(Baton Rouge, La)


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