I tried to do this a few years ago, but didn’t meet with much sucess. A few things I learned:
-What you use to discharge at the top of your coil is very important! It is acting as half of a cap (the discharge torroid, sphere, whatever, and the Earth).
-Run a “low” voltage through the primary, and hook the output of the secondary up to an osciliscope. Adjust either your capacitance or inductance to hit resonance.
I’m sure there were other things I that found out but I think those were the big ones. If you look around you can find some neat programs to help you design your coil. “WinTesla” comes to mind. If I find it laying around I’ll send it your way.
Bah! Tesla coils! If I were you, I’d spend your time and money building and perfecting the ultimate potatoe canno - er… potatoe accelerator. My goal this summer is to build a pnumatic one, preferably one with a barrel capable of shooting a coke bottle. But thats gonna take some time and experermintation. But don’t worry, I don’t plan to use it to fire chlorine bombs… maybe bottles filled with water or glowstick innards
LOL!! Dan, when you do make this "Soda-Bottle Accelorator, please let me know so I can play with it too! You’re gona need a lot of big PVC or ABS (i think it might be better for pneumatic).
They’re toxic?! hmm, that could be a small problem. I know people who have emptied out the innards into a cannon and shot it off… nice magical mist…
Innards in a coke bottle would, well, make it visible at night. Imagine taking a nice serene walk through the neighborhood one late summer evening, fireflies dancing, evening sprinklers on, just you and - BOOM! Look above you and something glowing bright green blurs above your head and two kids are screaming, “Heads!”
Of course, shooting it off in the middle of a neighborhood is just asking for a bill for fixing someone’s house, window, car, cat…
This summer (by then i’ll have a job and cash to waste on fun projects like this)…we could try to make a very miniture version (still dangerous …but thats the fun)
You two can do the electrical stuff and i’ll do all the mechanical stuff…i can see this being quite easy…hey…maybe we can get some hints or help from Koors (he’s the guy with all the cool gadgets and projects )
…OR…
I can try to talk to Tino and get the 10ft and ~21ft Spud Guns from his grandparents…and then we can fix them up (i know they wont work joints too weak from sitting around…[we almost killed our selves on the 4th of July when the darn thing exploded…heheh])