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Re: Second First Light



Original poster: FutureT@xxxxxxx In a message dated 6/16/06 4:22:32 PM Eastern Daylight Time, tesla@xxxxxxxxxx writes:

John, All,

>A larger toroid will generally give brighter sparks.  There may
>be other things going on also.  Are the sparks purple or blue?
>Too much purple indicates poor operation of the coil.
>
>John

I'm curious about the purple sparks indicating poor operation. What aspect
of poor operation causes this, and why?

Just wondering,

Jonathan
www.madlabs.info


Jonathan,

I'm not an expert on the purple spark phenomenon.
The purple color represents low energy in the
sparks.  A blue color represents higher energy, and
a white color indicates even higher energy.
I remember I built an early coil which happened to be
my first efficient coil.  It used a 12/30 nst and ran at
a low breakrate due to wide gap spacing.  So in this
case the purple sparks may have been at least partly
due to the low breakrate.  The quenching probably wasn't
that great either, since the sparks tended to shorten
after a few seconds of running.  I had to use loose
coupling otherwise racing sparks appeared.
In any case it gave 40" sparks which was good
for 1991 or so.  However the sparks looked kind of
weak, dim, and purple, but they were long.
Later I rebuilt the coil into a magnifier and used
a better gap with air blower quenching.  In this
configuration the coil ran at a higher breakrate
and gave proper bluish brighter sparks.

Richard Hull used to also talk a lot about purple
sparks on his videotapes, saying that they represent
inefficient operation and perhaps poor quenching.
I think I remember folks on this list also talking about
the bad aspects of purple sparks, but I don't remember
what was said.  Sparks that don't hit a ground will tend
to have a purple color to some degree, but it's the amount
of purple that is important.  I remember seeing one of
DC Cox's (Dr Resonance) coils at the Science Center
In Jersey City NJ.  This coil gives beautiful floating
blue sparks that are mesmerizing to watch.

None of my subsequent coils gave such weak purple
sparks, so I'm not really that familiar with the condition.

If a toroid is too large it can tend to make the sparks
look somewhat purplish too.  I remember the tests
I did by installing a 6" x 26" ducting toroid on my
old research coil.  The normal toroid was a 4' x 17"
ducting toroid.  The sparks didn't get any longer
with the 6" x 26" toroid (insufficient power), but they
got fatter and purplish.  I didn't like the look at all.
The toroid was clearly underpowered.

In general if you take a powerful coil such as Ed
Wingate's coil, or R. Hull's old Nemesis coil, and
turn down the power until the sparks are short at
perhaps a few feet long, then the sparks will get
purplish.  In normal operation they are bluish.
So this too suggests that the combination of a
large toroid with low power produces purplish
sparks.  However in my old coil that I mentioned
in the first paragraph which gave purplish sparks,
something else was happening other than the
combo of input power and toroid size.  The amount
of power that was actually making it into the sparks
may have been low however due to poor quenching,
low breakrate, or whatever.

John