[TCML] Introductions ....

[Art Pollard <pollarda@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Everybody!  I just signed up for the mailing list and thought I 
ought to give an introduction.

I am planning on building a fairly sizeable tesla coil and clearly, 
this is the place to meet like minded people and hopefully I'll be 
able to learn what I need to know here to build the tesla coil I've 
always dreamed of building. I built several smaller tesla coils some 
20 years ago. (My how time flies!) Probably the largest was almost 
four feet tall and it threw out some pretty hefty sparks.  I never 
got it tuned quite right and it suffered from interwinding breakdown 
on the secondary because of that.  I've always wanted to build a much 
larger tesla coil and have decided that now is the time to start 
thinking about it seriously.

I have a moderate amount of experience working with high voltage 
equipment. While in high school, I worked on the Topolotron fusion 
reactor at BYU during the summers. It had a 4 food diameter torus 
that we would pump the deuterium and tritium in. The confinement 
magnets were driven by a series of 15-20 capacitors that were rated 
for about 30KV and stood about three feet tall (and maybe 2 foot 
square).  We had a huge faraday cage that protected the Tektronix 
computer we controlled it with.  I worked on a similar project at the 
University of Washington also while in high school. It was a cylinder 
and the idea was that the plasma would be heated up and then later 
injected into a much larger torus where the actual fusion would 
occur.  The Topolotron alas is no longer extant though the project at 
the UW apparently is still ongoing.  Needless to say, that was some 
years ago. The litigious nature of society today would surely prevent 
a curious high school student from being able to work on projects of 
this nature and have free reign of the university machine shop.   My 
original plan was to go in into plasma physics and in particular to 
work on the ZT-40 fusion reactor in Los Alamos where I partly grew 
up.  It is probably a good thing that I didn't -- fusion research is 
almost nil in the U.S. now and the ZT-40 has long since been 
disassembled. (Though when it fired, its capacitors output 3 times 
the entire world's output of electricity for the brief instant it was on.)

Today, I run a software company where I design (and write) search 
engines.  I design the underlying search technology that is used in a 
wide variety of products. I write the underlying search code and it 
is licensed out as a code library for other developers.  Most people 
have used my code in some form or another and never know it since it 
is all used as parts of other projects.  I have a side business too. 
While attending my university, I worked for our physics department 
designing and building equipment.  One day, I made the off hand 
comment that it would be interesting to make my own chocolate -- not 
knowing what was involved.  It was a simple comment that I thought it 
would be interesting -- just like making a creme brule would be 
interesting (I like to cook when I have time).  The friends I was 
with at the time said that I couldn't do it -- not without millions 
of dollars of equipment and highly specialized skills.   Given that, 
I thought that it sounded hugely fascinating. Now (years later), I 
own and operate http://www.amanochocolate.com where I'm the head 
chocolate maker.  When I say "chocolate maker" that means we actually 
make our chocolate -- from the world's finest quality cocoa 
beans.  So when I'm not writing code, I keep pretty busy making 
chocolate in our factory.  Of course this also means that now I have 
6,000 feet of floor space, 17 foot ceilings and lots of single phase 
and three phase power as well as a huge (empty) parking lot that 
would be perfect for setting up a large tesla coil in.

Needless to say, the days when I was building smaller tesla coils 
were quite some years ago and I haven't had time to devote to my 
interest in high energy plasmas for almost the same number of 
years.  I still get a little time around machine shops -- mostly 
while I'm in the process of fixing my chocolate machinery.  But I'm 
pretty rusty all in all when it comes to tesla coils and electronics 
so I really hope to learn something here on the list and maybe I can 
contribute something as well.  Given the years, I have a lot of 
catching up to do so I hope you all will excuse any clueless 
questions I may ask as I feel it is better to ask a dumb question 
than make a dumb mistake especially where high voltages are concerned.

I'm pretty swamped time-wise so I'll probably spend more time lurking 
than posting. The holiday season is almost upon us -- which also 
means chocolate season and I have a new search engine that I'm just 
finishing up. Both seem to demand quite a bit of time.  I'm hoping 
that as I build my tesla coil, I can give myself a break from my 
other projects.

I have to pass along my favorite tesla coil story. When I was in high 
school, I built a small tesla coil out of a TV flyback 
transformer.  Since it was nice and small I packed it and a battery 
pack in a cigar box along with a 3 foot high voltage wire.  It threw 
out a nice spark for its size and with the batteries it was nice and 
portable.

We had an English teacher who never liked to actually teach and 
because of this, he would give us huge writing assignments so he 
could read magazines while we all worked. On the day in question, we 
were working on our latest writing assignment. It was dead quiet as 
the teacher read his aviation magazines and we worked diligently. 
Being quite board I pulled my small tesla coil out of my backpack 
turned it on and proceeded to shock my friend Jeff on the elbow as he 
worked.  Jeff jumped up -- his chair screeching back and he yelled 
almost at the top of his voice: "Awww S^&**(!!!!!". He then noticed 
that the entire class was looking at him because of his 
outburst.  Jeff said in a totally straight tone of voice: "Oh, I'm 
sorry". He sat down and started working on his writing assignment as 
if nothing had ever happened. Of course, this left the rest of the 
class and our teacher wondering in amazement what had just 
happened.  Jeff and I are still very good friends and when we get 
together, we both have a pretty good laugh at this. (And yes, Jeff 
found an equally devious way to get his revenge a month or two later.)

Anyway, that is my little introduction. I hope to get to know you all 
here to some degree (as much as possible via the internet anyway).  I 
hope that I can contribute something but mostly I hope that I can 
learn something from the real experts. ;-)

-Art


--
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.
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