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Registered Member #3781
Joined: Sat Mar 26 2011, 02:25AM
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Posts: 701
I bought 12 glass Snapple bottles and mixed 3 cups of iodized salt in 1 gallon of water. I have filled up each Snapple bottle with 1.75 cups of salt water and then filled the rest up with vegtable oil.
I checked the capacitance with my dmm and it's showing 0.90nF which seems low to me. Do I need to charge the caps before I read the capacitance, and if so, how should I go about doing that?
Finally, my coil is 3.5" in diameter, and 20" tall wound with 26awg wire. How much capacitance do I need for a spark gap tesla coil? I'm using a 15kv 30ma NST. Also, how wide should my NST safety gap be?
Registered Member #15
Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 01:11PM
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Posts: 3068
The question begging to be asked is why are you using bottle capacitors to begin with in this day of age?
With a 15kV/30mA NST, you should be able to get the proper capacitance with a few MMC capacitors at probably not much more than what it would cost for 12 bottles of Snapple.
To calculate the capacitance you need, download WinTelsa or TeslaCad 2.0 or JavaTC. These are nice calculators which will calculate the amount of capacitance you need.
Registered Member #3781
Joined: Sat Mar 26 2011, 02:25AM
Location:
Posts: 701
Alright now I understand that the primary coil really depends on the tank capacitor. Unfortunately, I don't know much about the specs of snapple capacitors. I was thinking two lines of 6 caps in parralel and then put both lines in series with each other, that should give me at least a few nF, hopefully without any exploding glass. Then cobble together a primary helicoil of maybe 10 turns with a 4" radius and see what happens?
EDIT: Found the autotune box... Guess I'm looking at about 35 turns on a 10" dia primary helicoil
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Quick question about homemade caps
