Tesla Coil Build Thread

[Fiddy]

It will look like a boss with the new breakout spike

 

[Atomicrox]

Looking good! Might look even better with exposed primary wires.. gotta love exposed wires

 

[Things]

Needs one of those little ionic spinners on top

 

[Speedy78]

Interesting. What is this spinner you speak off. Currently have a sweet spike coming in the mail to top it off.

 

[Fiddy]

a special design piece of metal balance's on the break out point and breaks out from both? ends of it, the breakout causes ionic wind and causes it to spin around the coil, TWIRLING AND TWIRLING...

 

[Speedy78]

Could something like this be created with a folded up piece of tinfoil? I can picture the concept. Just unsure if that material would work.

Edit: got a little bit of spinning with some crafted tinfoil. It always seems to get going and fly off. Probably not balanced. I even trued to make it push itself ontp my breakout and spin but it gets up to speed and flys off.

 

[Fiddy]

yeah that would work if it was balanced, surely there's a mob who make em, i swear ive seen them for sale somewhere.

 

[Things]

Just get some thin sheet aluminium, not as thin as foil but thin enough you can just cut it with decent scissors. Use a solid, sharp object to put a dent in the middle for it to balance on, then trim it up until it's balanced. Did I mention balancing is tedious?

 

[irishluck]

Never thought id see this topic on this forum.

SO let me show you my 6ft Tesla coil I built for fun!

 

[Sigurthr]

Very nice! Classic sgtc.

 

[irishluck]

Very nice! Classic sgtc.

Im in the middle of designing my new one. Will stand roughly 15ft tall and hopefully will have 15ft+ discharges

 

[Atomicrox]

Spark video or it didn't happen

 

[irishluck]

Ill have to see if I can find it.

My first few runs, I blew up the terry filter a couple times because I soldered the caps wrong.

I know I have a video where you can kinda see the discharges but my camera isnt that good.

Didnt get a video of it when I got it tuned with some decent size discharges!

 

[LtKernelPanic]

I've been looking at the kits from EVR I'm really liking the looks of the microBrute however I'm wondering if it'd be too advanced for a first coil project. After reading the assembly instructions aside from winding the secondary, which will undoubtably try my patience, the only part that concerns me is the part where you have to wind and properly phase the gate transformer since I know very little about EE and have never done something like that. While I'm not a soldering pro (nor a noob for that matter) the actual assembly doesn't look too bad. I know I could easily build their SSTC 1.0 kit but honestly it doesn't really have that Tesla coil "look" that I'm going for to be honest. Anyhow I thought I'd ask the more experienced builders here first before doing something stupid and wasting my money. Now to start saving my nickels so I can get one of the kits for something to do once the snow flies in a couple months.

 

[Fiddy]

I've been looking at the kits from EVR I'm really liking the looks of the microBrute however I'm wondering if it'd be too advanced for a first coil project. After reading the assembly instructions aside from winding the secondary, which will undoubtably try my patience, the only part that concerns me is the part where you have to wind and properly phase the gate transformer since I know very little about EE and have never done something like that. While I'm not a soldering pro (nor a noob for that matter) the actual assembly doesn't look too bad. I know I could easily build their SSTC 1.0 kit but honestly it doesn't really have that Tesla coil "look" that I'm going for to be honest. Anyhow I thought I'd ask the more experienced builders here first before doing something stupid and wasting my money. Now to start saving my nickels so I can get one of the kits for something to do once the snow flies in a couple months.

I was in the same boat last year, being my first big boy tesla coil, the soldering is easy, there's just lots of it, winding the secondary is time consuming, but if you make a decent winding jig it will help a lot, the gate transformer is pretty easy to phase, winding them for good coupling was the tedious part for me.

Id go for it, it will challenge you as it did me, but you will come good in the end if you put in the effort,

if you havent seen my build thread for the micrbrute its here: http://laserpointerforums.com/f60/holiday-project-drsstc-d-78988.html

 

[Speedy78]

I'm tempted to try this out. I feel like there would be enough help here to get me through the tough parts. Like all this talk about the gate transformer.