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Registered Member #139
Joined: Sat Feb 11 2006, 11:01AM
Location: Perth, Western Australia
Posts: 358
Gate destruction is a favourite of mine :P It's quite amusing to see sparks, then flames. Upon dissasembly, the MOSFET's literally fell apart, loose legs all over the place.
Registered Member #282
Joined: Sat Mar 04 2006, 11:45PM
Location: North Chicago, US
Posts: 28
I wish I had a pic, but oh well. I left a transformer on overnight at an above rated voltage (in a plastic case nonetheless). I woke up the next morning to a pool of plastic sitting on my floor.
Registered Member #89
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145
lol! But that seems preintended
I have one recent 'failure', but that is happening very slowly. Secondary of my nano SSTC is going bannana.
After maybe minute of operation secondary heats up that much that its PVC former starts to deform, and I cant help there much any more. Its horribly old and wasnt even varnished until recently. Another secondary I have has solid poliester core so it won't suffer from such problems.
Registered Member #79
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 11:35AM
Location: Arkansas
Posts: 673
My first highish-power tesla coil's secondary used to glow. My thought was "I didn't know it was supposed to do that." It's not. I actually thought it was pretty cool until the performance dropped considerably. After taking off the toroid, the PVC was one big briquette inside.
I didn't have a clue about theory and stuff back then. I think I was pushing something like 1800W into 2" of PVC and too much coupling. No wonder. What else is funny, I was getting like 10" sparks
Registered Member #89
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145
Ths one is heating because it operates at 2Mhz and wire is only 0,1mm so skin depth makes secondary of very high ohmic resistance. I lose a lot of power there and it would melt in minutes, so runs must be stopped.
Coil looks a little like a bannana and few turns are overlapped, but it doestn bother for now
Registered Member #75
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 09:30AM
Location: Montana, USA
Posts: 711
Here is another fun one: Primary arcing to secondary without me noticing, aparently some turns shorted and I nearly burned the whole secondary:
The plastic former melted and shrunk, so the secodary came loose. This was only visible after removing the primary which was wound on top. I spend hours trying to debug the driver circuit before I finally noticed that the fault was with the coil.
Registered Member #89
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145
Maybe it really was a good idea to wind a ugly secondary on a bottle...
In my royer coil primary actually liked to be weakly coupled, it was actually under the secondary windings with feedback just loosely passing over it. Few times it arced t my feedback but as it is in harmony with oscilaltion nothing happened t mosfets (but it did smoke a bit)
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Most spectacular failures
