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Registered Member #336
Joined: Wed Mar 22 2006, 01:34AM
Location:
Posts: 5
Heres the problum(this is my secound tesla coil that i have built BTW) I can't get any streamers form the toriod. But i can light up a floresncet tube if i get it close enough. Does anyone know what might be causeing this?
My specs are as follows:
12 inch secoundary fourm with an 11 inch winding hight, and 1 inch diaminter.
12 turn primary in a pancake fourm, wire is copper house with a .25 inch diamiter.
power supply is a 6kV 30mA NST, the compacitor is 3 beer bottle caps
Registered Member #105
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:54PM
Location:
Posts: 408
I know it may sound simple, but have you tried tuning quite a bit? Also, the secondary is a bit out of proportion to one that I would normally use. I actually have a coil with the same transformer you have, but using a secondary on 2 inch PVC with a winding height of about 12 inches with 32 or 34 wire seemed to work well for me- about 10 inch streamers. The toroid that worked best was a 4" ball. Also, I would try to get some commercial capacitors, so the capacitance is known. Beer bottle caps seem to vary a lot, and unless you have a capacitance meter, it will be hard to get a good gues on where the primary tap should be. For my transformer, I have a string of 18 in series (630V caps), then three of these strings in series, and it works well.
Registered Member #242
Joined: Thu Feb 23 2006, 11:37PM
Location: Erie PA
Posts: 210
pretty much every website I've seen talks about using around a 4:1 ratio for the hieght to diameter ratio. I'd suggest downloading the 'teslamap' software, it has quite a bit of useful design info in it.
Registered Member #99
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:10PM
Location: florida, usa
Posts: 637
Jrz126 wrote ...
pretty much every website I've seen talks about using around a 4:1 ratio for the hieght to diameter ratio. I'd suggest downloading the 'teslamap' software, it has quite a bit of useful design info in it.
I doubt his ratio is preventig sparks, although it is quite a large ratio for a tesla coil...Have you a breakout point on the topload?Put a nail,wire,anything small and sharp on top.
Registered Member #229
Joined: Tue Feb 21 2006, 07:33PM
Location: Romania
Posts: 506
Put a needle on the top and run it in a dark room (pay attention to not electrocute yourself), with different taps on the primary turns. Find the turn with the maximum corona output from your nail. If it is the outer turn, you need more primary capacity, or more turns. If you get the maximum corona going to the inner turn, you have to decrease the primary cap or to increase the secondary capacity (add a toroid, or a bigger topload of any kind). It is better to make first some calculus about your primary/secondary parameters, to guess where you are and what changes have to be made...
Registered Member #313
Joined: Mon Mar 13 2006, 02:50AM
Location:
Posts: 8
The height to width ratio seems to be more important on larger coils, but it probably does have some effect on smaller coils (like this one). 6:1 is probably the most i would go.
According to TeslaMap... Assuming your using 30 AWG wire on the secondary, and the wire spacing in your primary is 0.25 inches, with a 3 inch center hole diameter, and you have a 4 inch sphere as a top load, and you have 20nF or primary capacitance... you'll be tuned at about turn 2-3.
If no amount of tuning seems to help, then you may have too much top load, and the streamers cannot break out. In that case reduce the size of the top load and keep a thumb tack on it to help streamer breakout.
Also check all your connections (it only takes one bad connection).
Registered Member #50
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 04:07AM
Location: Vernon, B.C, Canada
Posts: 324
I made pretty much the exact same secondary coil, and all I was able to get was Voltage IN ----> Voltage Out was equal, so no voltage step up, The solution? I made a new secondary...
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Telsa coil not makeing streamers
