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What is your Tesla Coil experience??

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bomberguy92

Fri Dec 28 2007, 11:27PM

Registered Member #1181 Joined: Mon Dec 17 2007, 10:48PM
Location: Iowa USA
Posts: 17

Hey,
You guys have been great in helping me with my first coil and its coming along great. So I was wondering where you got all your experience with Tesla Coils. I want to know how many coils you've built, what kind they where, what kind of transformer they were powered with, and how big they were. Let's measure size by voltage, secondary size, and biggest Strike. Pictures would be great. I look forward to seeing your coils.

Kizmo

Fri Dec 28 2007, 11:48PM

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

TC's are the part of power electronics that just can't be written down to one clear book or manual. Of course basic points of design and adjustments are easy to put to on paper but final 'touch' can be done only by trial and error. It needs motivation and certain sort of mind to just keep going and try again if something burns, explodes or catches on fire (quite common things..

) I have made three coils so far, all of them are spark gap coils. Now im building my first solid state coil, im looking forward to get it working without tens of dead mosfets.

If you look up you see mr. Tdu's thread ** Add your Tesla coil here ** There you can find several coils :)

J. Aaron Holmes

Sat Dec 29 2007, 12:27AM

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

bomberguy92 wrote ...

You guys have been great in helping me with my first coil and its coming along great. So I was wondering where you got all your experience with Tesla Coils.

Hi again! I definitely have to second Kizmo's recommendation that you read the following thread (or at least skim it):
http://4hv.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?14

I'm a fairly contemplative person, and in fact spent many years reading about Tesla coils and the like before actually building one. It started with Richard Hull's "Tesla Coil Video Primer" back in the early 1990's when I was in high school, and continued through college as I collected more and more HV junk and built Jacob's ladders and other simpler stuff. It seemed like I always had plenty of time to *think about* Tesla coils, but until I'd formed my own intuition for how all of the parts worked, and until I'd collected what I believed were some really great parts, I was unwilling to actually build one. It probably has something to do with the fact that I'm a software engineer by trade and hate getting my hands dirty

Consequently, my first Tesla coil was powered by a pole pig! I don't recommend that!! I just happen to be especially good at collecting very large HV aparatus (a trait my wife loaths, believe me!), and of course I was going to use what I had on hand.

I'm presently working on a very large SISG-based coil with a couple of other Seattle-based coilers. Details coming this spring.

Cheers,
Aaron, N7OE

HDR

Sat Dec 29 2007, 01:03AM

Registered Member #1165 Joined: Sun Dec 09 2007, 04:41AM
Location: GA, USA
Posts: 35

I'm working on my first (hopefully working) TC as well. I have made a previous attempt at a spark gap coil, but just could not get it to work... I'm hoping to have more success with the solid state I'm working on right now, but it dosen't seem to be going that way..already blew up one transistor, a circuit board trace and part of my oscilloscope (thankfully, it was only a vacuum tube, and I have a spare)

MOT_man

Sat Dec 29 2007, 01:55AM

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

A few years experience for me....
I did lots of investigation into Tesla - himself. Then I spent a couple of years playing with various high voltage devices - transformers - capacitors and got a feel for this kinda stuff. It involved a couple of close calls - and a few severe electric shocks. I learned respect really quickly!
I began to construct various small sized coils running off of junk transformers - OBITs and NSTs... then I moved to slightly more powerful transformers and larger capacitors.

My earliest coil was a dual 10kV OBIT coil running 500 VA.... I'm on 10th coil project now... It is school team project - running a potential transformer driven 6" X 33" system. I will be running 50 nF 46 kVDC rated cap bank... ARSG driven at 600 bps. Should be a monster :)

Hazmatt_(The Underdog)

Sat Dec 29 2007, 02:37AM

Registered Member #135 Joined: Sat Feb 11 2006, 12:06AM
Location: Anywhere is fine
Posts: 1735

I started playing with coils a long while back when I was about 16. My first coil was powered by a 7500V 18mA transformer and used glass Dearborn capacitors that everyone here goes crazy about. I've had several failures with these glass capacitors, but no M80 style like they are claimed to.

As I got more into it, I started building rotary gaps out of FR4, got larger transformers, and started playing with more conventional coil aspect ratios. Later I acquired Mica doorknobs that would push my coil performance to 18" sparks with 300W NST's. I soon found that the vintage Spragues, intended for decoupling only, could be pushed so far and no further. Attempting to match Micas and a 12/60 proved fatal for the transformer and the caps.

Some years went by as I acquired more equipment, a Westinghouse PT 12/120, more small NST's to replace the one I killed, and more coils were made.
Up until about 2 years ago things were hit or miss, but then I happened to get the right mixture of ceramic doorknobs and stats which resulted in getting 36" sparks from 720VA 12/60. It has been my benchmark ever since for distance vs. input power and is my comparison of other coils as well.

A while ago I studied LTR and input characteristics of the system and found optimal calculations for system performance using simulation and derivations used in power electronics classes.

Presently I am designing a measuring instrument so you can measure your coil reactance, which will allow you to determine the impedance of the coil. Knowing this, one can optimize the system and perform more calculations on what is happening. It will also allow me to improve my AC Resistance model and make sure others have an accurate measure.

After this will be the coupling optimization and critical case verification. This will make sure the coil is positioned properly for maximum breakout and I will go back to simulation to see everything checks out, predicted and measured.

This whole adventure for me has been very expensive and intensive. I have now a complete 2430A, older HP spectrum analyzer, frequency counters, 2 Boonton RF Voltmeters, LCR meter, and a bunch of odds and ends. This has got to be the most expensive hobby I have ever dabbled in and it drives me crazy when I don't have a way of measuring something that I need to know for analysis.

So to get sparks: LCR meter, DMM, freq. counter.
Analysis: $$$$$$$$$$$ sky is the limit there, so don't ask too many questions ;p and you won't go insane.

Dr. Dark Current

Sat Dec 29 2007, 10:02AM

Registered Member #152 Joined: Sun Feb 12 2006, 03:36PM
Location: Czech Rep.
Posts: 3384

My first TC was rather interesting, I used a single transistor flyback driver with less than 30W input (this means less than 20W output

) with DC flyback, two little *ceramic* caps (the "protection" ones that you can find in SMPS's) and a 20cm tall secondary. I just threw it together without calculating anything and it gave 5cm ground arcs.

My second (and probably last) TC was IRF740 halfbridge which later exploded with ~20cm hot arcs.

Tesla coils probably did not fascinate me enough, I seem to like lower voltage non-TC power arcs more (MOTs, flybacks etc.)

Zum Beispiel

Sat Dec 29 2007, 03:55PM

Registered Member #514 Joined: Sun Feb 11 2007, 12:27AM
Location: Somewhere in Pirkanmaa, Finland
Posts: 295

I've built two SSTCs and am working on third one. Originally wanted to build a SGTC but the noise, space and RFI problems kept me from starting. SSTCs are nice little things, as you can run them on your kitchen table and the neighbors won't get (too) mad

Linas

Sat Dec 29 2007, 05:06PM

Registered Member #1143 Joined: Sun Nov 25 2007, 04:55PM
Location: Vilnius, Lithuania
Posts: 721

Yes, sstc is cool, DRSSTC sounds horible, VTTC is very heavy, SGTC is heavy and noise is horible.
My 1,5KW sstc is just 4Kg, i can take it wherever i want :) and no spark sound, just light

Dr. Drone

Sat Dec 29 2007, 08:10PM

Registered Member #290 Joined: Mon Mar 06 2006, 08:24PM
Location:
Posts: 1673

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