It lives! WOOT!

Part Scavenger, Wed May 31 2006, 02:12AM

My DRSSTC is alive after many weeks of waiting! My dad told me I had to clean up all my crap before I could do anything else. I've been working on that for about 2 mo. Sheesh, but it looks great. I'm glad it did it.

The saturday before memorial day, I was back into action. I spent the afternoon of memorial day building a new primary and running scantesla stuff. Scantesla suggested a coupling of .185 and primary at 10.5 turns. 10.5 seemed a little high to me, but oh well. I tried it anyway.

After doing all that, I tried it out. To my chagrin, it performed no better than it did before. After poking about some more, I realized that I had soldered the primary tank capacitors improperly making the primary resonate MUCH lower than the secondary... Too late, time for bed.

Next morning (this morning). Fixed the capacitors and right away got longer sparks. My OCD is still acting up! Cutting out at 50A and not allowing adjustment. One of the pins on a 555 in the circuit had a cold weld on the ground. When you pushed on it with the meter, it tested fine, but when you let off, it disconnected itself. What a booger it was to find! Then after fixing that, I

The FGA cheapos suck, the International Rectifier's GRP-somethings are great. So are these obscure Fairchild ones that I'm using right now. I'll post part #'s on my site soon.

FGA's croak, and like a moron, I had forgotten to add a fuse and my variac craters Not good, but it repairs. 5 min later, I realize the fuse blew in my 'scope at the same time and I don't have another. Worries me why the fuse blew...?

I've still got problems with my OCD, it won't fire at all now, even after checking all components and replacing chips. Hmm. Any ideas? The output of the comparator stays high the whole time. I was going to scope it, but see above.

BTW, I got 22" and the groundstrike with the screwed up OCD killed my IGBTs.

Since I lost my scope about 2:00, I've been slowly increasing the power and recording data on the safe side. The new Fairchilds are holding up great. I'm getting 12" streamers with 360W. I should be getting lots better, but I'm working on it. Then I dropped my interrupter and knocked the ground wire loose. After repairing it, I ran it with the case open. Doing so I touched the back of the interrupter board, and...

HOLY SMOKES! *Jumps back in terror*

Apparently, I touched off a really long pulse. Then, I did it over and over for fun! Boy I wish I could see this on the 'scope. It must not be too hard on my IGBTs as I can do it for long(ish) periods of time.

Enjoy the videos, the first one's great! Looks like Steve's "long pulse" thread. Note, I'm not running the coil properly here...

EDIT=> Hmm. No vids. Hang on...