Craig
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Registered: 4-5-2005
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Spark Gap Tesla Coil
Hi,
My latest project is a spark gap tesla coil. I started to get the first streamers today. I thought some of you might be interested  . Here's some specs:
4 MOT (Microwave Oven Transformer) Power Supply.
Inductive Ballast (limits the current draw to 10A).
Secondary Diameter 110mm (1000 turns of 0.55mm wire).
Asynchronous Rotary Spark Gap.
80nF MMC Tank Cap (originally bottle caps).
It still needs some more tuning, but so far the results are quite nice. I've attached some pictures of it running. Although the pictures never
quite capture the full effect. I've got other details and pictures on my website (www.craigsarea.com/sgtc.html).
The following image shows a close up of the toroid. The full size image, which is much bigger than this one, is available on my website.
Hope you like it .
[Edited on 10-7-2005 by Craig]
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12AX7
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Wewt
Gonna put some glass around the SG and make a Birkeland-Eyde reactor? 
Tim
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Lambda
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Aah....nice to see Tesla coils on this forum !
Nice work Craig.....beautiful !
An excelent page on solid state Tesla coil design and theory can allso be found on Richie Burnett's website:
http://www.richieburnett.co.uk/tesla.shtml
For the real big stuff, check out Marco's Tesla website....auwsome !:
http://www.elisanet.fi/dncmrc/
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Chris The Great
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Here's mine, running a 4 MOT stack as well but as of yet I haven't made a saturable core reactor to control it despite having all the parts.
Maybe I'm just not eager to wind 200 turns of thick heavy gauge wire carefully by hand.
http://img275.echo.cx/img275/8743/arc29zz.jpg
http://img275.echo.cx/img275/977/arc10uv.jpg
I'm going to upgrade my bottle cap to the 120nF range when I get all my dad's stuff moved out of the way so I can get to my beer bottles
(all 200 of them) and MOT stack. Right now it's about 43nF.
General specs of the coil:
Secondary- ~1100 turns 24 guage wire
4.5 inch diameter
21 inch hieght
Power input is approximatly 15,000 watts. Obviously, most of that doesn't make it to the coil and is spent power arcing in the sparkgap. Hence
why I need a power controller and better sparkgap.
Nice job, looks alot "cleaner" and "proffesional" than mine, which looks exactly like what it is: scrounged junk 
An interesting trick to do with high voltage is to arc on the surface of distilled water. The electrode should just be above the surface. The arcs
travel very long distances over the surface because it is so smooth.
See http://members.iinet.net.au/~pterren/Other_HV_stuff.htm#Stra...
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Saerynide
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Thats awesome guys
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satisfy any applicable law, regulation or legal process"
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Craig
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Registered: 4-5-2005
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| Quote: | | Gonna put some glass around the SG and make a Birkeland-Eyde reactor? |
Good idea . Funny you say that because I was looking at AxeHandles website (http://species8472.dyndns.org/no2/no2.html ) a couple of days ago. Not sure it's something I'm going to try though.
| Quote: | | Nice work Craig.....beautiful ! |
Cheers .
| Quote: | | An excelent page on solid state Tesla coil design and theory can allso be found on Richie Burnett's website: |
Yeah, Richie's website is probably one of the best Tesla coil theory websites on the internet. My first coil was a solid state type (www.craigsarea.com/sstc.html) which probably wouldn't have been possible without Richie Burnett sharing the results of his research.
| Quote: | | looks alot "cleaner" and "proffesional" than mine |
I wouldn't say that. Yours looks pretty smooth. The streamers in your photos look great. Thumbs up for using beer bottles. I originally used
106 of them, but they were so heavy and space consuming that I chickend out and replaced them with an MMC. I don't think I've got the will
power to use 200 of them. Good luck to you .
[Edited on 10-7-2005 by Craig]
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