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stun gun tesla coil?

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LAN_403

)crazycoil(

Mon Dec 24 2007, 01:21AM

Registered Member #1190 Joined: Mon Dec 24 2007, 12:58AM
Location:
Posts: 2

Hi im new here and new to tesla coils.I have done a few high voltage things in the past but not a tesla coil.
So i have a question my mother is incredibly protective and when fire or electricity is involved it makes her freak out.
Stun guns arent as deadly as a microwave oven transformer or neon transformer it also is preassembled and can be purchased cheaply on ebay.Inside they contain a sparkgap,transformer,and capacitors among other things i suppose.What would happen if i constructed the normal primary and secondary and hooked up the stun gun to it would it work?
Im terribly sorry if this has been asked before but it should be nice and mom approved!If you guys dont think it will work would you please direct me to a simple battery operated tesla coil?

MOT_man

Mon Dec 24 2007, 02:10AM

Registered Member #1127 Joined: Mon Nov 19 2007, 12:08AM
Location:
Posts: 139

Nope - not even close! A stun gun is NOT a Tesla Coil - these are vastly different beasts. A stun gun is small - low power high voltage circuit that uses a 9V - 18V DC power source that feeds into a 555 timer - high voltage circuit. The transformer inside produces 2-4 kVDC at low current oscillated by the 555 timer. Then this high voltage in fed into a multiplier circuit which steps up the voltage to nearly 10X-20X input. Then a ceramic disc capacitor or foil caps stores up the multiplied voltage and then suddenly releases it. Sudden high voltage pulse with several joules of potential energy behind it overwhelms the nervous system... sometimes the energy is enough to cause death.

A Tesla Coil - works on an air cored resonance system. The high voltage generator is usually a large air filled high value inductor with a It requires heavy duty power - stiff current and a much larger capacitor. The system works on oscillating magnet fields generated by
pulsed current several hundred - to a thousand amps while voltages are thousands of volts. Now solid state Tesla Coils are of much lower voltages but the current are HUGE! The output of the Tesla Coil is extremely dangerous - small sized coils maybe safe to touch while energized - while high power coils running several thousand watts are extremely DANGEROUS and can kill instantly.

Yes, a stun gun circuit could power a micro TC - but it would burn out the stun gun quickly. I tried this once...
A better way of getting a cheap and easy Tesla Coil to work is by using a car ignition coil with a AC run capacitor and a dimmer switch attached to a live 120V circuit. -- effortless high voltage - 20 -40kV AC adjustable!! Then feed that high voltage into a capacitors and spark gap --- and presto --- you have your primary supply for a 250 watt Tesla Coil....

Have fun,
Play safe!

J. Aaron Holmes

Mon Dec 24 2007, 02:20AM

Registered Member #477 Joined: Tue Jun 20 2006, 11:51PM
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 546

Hi! Welcome aboard!

Well, you *could* power a Tesla coil with a stun gun. In fact, you *can* power Tesla coils with just about anything. The question is: What kind of output are you interested in? Most people who build Tesla coils are interested in arbitrarily big sparks, and/or designing means of achieving arbitrarily big sparks. The kind of sparks you'll get from a stun gun-powered coil are unlikely to satisfy most people's definitions of "big" in the general context of Tesla coils, and I suspect that includes you. I'm thinking a couple of inches tops, unless you get real tricky and "save up" the charge from the stun gun for quite a while, then release it in one big "bang", effectively creating what's called a "single-shot" coil. Not a beginner's project. If, on the other hand, you'd be satisfied with a few inches of spark, you might build an ignition coil driver. You can produce surprisingly long sparks with ignition coils, and driving them can be as easy as a light dimmer and capacitor.

EDIT: Whoops! Little slow on the keyboard, I guess; MOT Man said a lot of what I said. Oh well...

Cheers,
Aaron, N7OE

)crazycoil(

Mon Dec 24 2007, 03:08AM

Registered Member #1190 Joined: Mon Dec 24 2007, 12:58AM
Location:
Posts: 2

Thanks for the replies! im not going to go for big sparks just yet im going to work my way up.I have a transformer from an old project and that should work ok.

...

Mon Dec 24 2007, 03:14AM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

Actually, a stun gun is quite close to a tesla coil. If simply uses a ferrite cored transformer instead of an air cored one. You could, in theory, create an air cored transfomer to replace the ferrite cored one to make it a tesla coil, but the sparks would be quite pathetic.

Kizmo

Mon Dec 24 2007, 09:57AM

Registered Member #599 Joined: Thu Mar 22 2007, 07:40PM
Location: Northern Finland, Rovaniemi
Posts: 624

If i were you, i would make flyback powered TC. With ZVS driver it can produce quite nice output :)

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