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Forums
4hv.org :: Forums :: Tesla Coils
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Any oppinions on spark gaps

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Sam
Thu Mar 16 2006, 03:20AM
Sam Registered Member #227 Joined: Mon Feb 20 2006, 10:47PM
Location: Cambridge Ontario, Canada!!
Posts: 127
Yes I did use a Jig like my previous sec. But this one took longer because I had kept messing up. I restarted I think 3 times. And I had my annoying 9-year-old in my shop..."whats this? Hows this work? can you make me one of those? whats this? Ow! that hurt!.ect etc..."
So It was quite an annoyance.
About the turn ratio I just re-measured and the lenth is 24 inches. Still not a good ratio at 12:1 but its better than 16:1... But now I only have 900 turns, I was hoping for 1200 but I
guess I cut wrong, woops. suprised

Also I've heard that the best angle for a primary is 35 deg? Is this right?
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ArcLight
Fri Mar 24 2006, 12:13AM
ArcLight Registered Member #341 Joined: Thu Mar 23 2006, 07:41PM
Location: Northern Illinois, USA
Posts: 69
This is my first post to this or any other HV forum. I wanted to build a Tesla coil for 35 years but never got around to it. Becoming unemployed eliminated my last excuse to procrastinate any longer. I have very little electronics background, but the wealth of information that I found on the threads of this site and others (often the same people posting) provided me the knowledge to finally achieve that goal. For that I would like to say thank you.

I use a 4 MOT power supply that is ballasted with a fifth MOT with the secondary shorted, this setup pops a 15amp breaker with some regularity. The relative low voltage of the MOTs required a very narrow gap. After looking at all of the ingenious designs for gaps, I settled on a variation of the “sucker gap” design. I didn’t like the idea of a shop vac for several reasons. The terrible noise is just irritating, plus all the wind blows the streamers around. But the biggest problem is sucking the heat and gases from the arc into the plumbing causing the gap to heat unnecessarily. I just happened to have a little squirrel cage blower from one of the microwaves that I salvaged the transformer from and so I built what I guess can only be described as a blow-gap.

All parts with the exception of the blower were obtained at a home supply store and consists of copper grounding clamps, schedule 40 PVC and .75” hard copper. I intend to change to 1” copper at some point, but at this power level the .75” seems to work just fine and is priced right.

In use, the gap hisses like an arc welder and looks like gas-stove burner (when viewed from the end along the axis of the pipe electrodes. One pipe gets warm and the other gets hot, like a candle flame. You can touch it, but only for a moment. It has never to my knowledge melted the solder that holds it together. My longest continuous run is twelve minutes and it was the ballast that was smoking, not the gap. I have done dozens and dozens of 5-6 minute runs and it’s always the ballast that shuts things down. I have now placed the ballast in oil.

When it’s really cold (my coil is on my unheated porch in far North Central Illinois) I sometimes have to let the gap power arc for a few moments before turning on the blower. This allows the pipe to heat up to working temperature and narrows the gap to the proper setting. Otherwise the coil will run in a very sporadic manner, but once the gap comes up to temperature and the blower is turned on, the coil roars.


1143158058 341 FT4253 Dscf8067p

1143158058 341 FT4253 Dscf8077p

1143158872 341 FT4253 Dscf8479p
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vasil
Fri Mar 24 2006, 08:40AM
vasil Registered Member #229 Joined: Tue Feb 21 2006, 07:33PM
Location: Romania
Posts: 506
Nice spark gap ArcLight, and good idea. The shop vacs and the vacuum cleaners motors are surely very noisy, it is very hard to run them in an apartment for example.
Benguy has to build his gap with the materials he has around though....
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Part Scavenger
Tue Mar 28 2006, 05:29AM
Part Scavenger Registered Member #79 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 11:35AM
Location: Arkansas
Posts: 673
Yeah, the H/D aspect will work. See Illustrated my 2nd, "I was out of PVC and didn't have a driver's license" coil. wink

You'll get much better results with better tuning and better H/D.

The second one is the same everything with better secondary. Oh, and I added a bowl on top for more topload

BTW, nice coil Arclight; I have to "pre-heat" my SG sometime too or I find myself messing with it alot.
1143523773 79 FT4253 Image00005

1143523773 79 FT4253 Image00010
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