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Registered Member #336
Joined: Wed Mar 22 2006, 01:34AM
Location:
Posts: 5
I am currently powering my 2 inch tesla coil with a small motercycle ignition coil useing a 220vac motor starting cap in seris with the igniton coil. What I am worred about is it overheating and exsploding on me, It gets pretty hot after a while, is this something i should worry about? Is it safe to run it more then 5 minutes
Registered Member #89
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145
Just a cap and IC, directly hooked to mains?
I wonder how you get any significant arcs that way. Ignition coil has a rod core and lots of leakage inductance and it can't be used like an ordinary transformer. It needs input to be chopped quickly in order to make big inductive kick and some killer arcs on the output.
You must use a light dimmer in series with your setup, or some other kind of IC driver.
Registered Member #50
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 04:07AM
Location: Vernon, B.C, Canada
Posts: 324
The reason that the coil is overheating is that the capacitance of the motor start cap. is too high, try lowing the value to get better results and less heat (from personal experience)
The late Marc Metlicka used what he called a "trigger gap" that used a lamp dimmer caps and such. Some information is here:
Nothing gets hot and the sparks are long mean and bright.
I am not sure how your system is wired and all, but the capacitor needs to be of the "motor run" type which is very low loss as opposed to the short duty "motor start" type of caps. Motor run caps tend to have smaller values and cost more but they shouyld have dramatically less heating.
Registered Member #89
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145
I actually don't think that the cap is going to heat up considerably at low frequencies it will see, I thnk that iggy will blow up far before the cap really overheats.
I've given lots of punishments to motor start and small MMC's and they never shown trouble for ignition coils.
If it overheats just use a smaller cap, and run dimmer at low duty cycles so the coil stays cool and happy.
Registered Member #341
Joined: Thu Mar 23 2006, 07:41PM
Location: Northern Illinois, USA
Posts: 69
I don’t know about motorcycle coils, but oil filled automotive ignition coils can and will explode, and I’ve had the oil on the ceiling to prove it.
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Ignition Coil PSU
