Tesla One (R.I.P.)

The first sparks ever Fluorescent tube zapping

It worked first time! I took a long exposure of the coil in action. You can see the streamers coming out to about 18". The topload I used (a metal salad bowl) has a sharp edge on the underside that causes early breakout, so I get a lot of short streamers, about 6 to 8 at a time. If I were to smooth it off somehow, I would probably get fewer, longer sparks, but I'm happy with the results so far. The light coming from behind the base is caused by the primary spark gap. One of the safety gaps on the transformer fired during the photo, causing the bright dot to the bottom right. The metal grid on the floor is a big piece of wire mesh I used as an RF groundplane. Here is a 20 watt 3' fluorescent tube getting some red-hot Tesla action. The sparks are jumping about 15" and the tube is lit brightly enough to see by. I put a pointed metal object (ok it's a spanner) on top of the coil to direct the sparks towards the victim. When I took this picture I had removed the earth wire from the main spark gap, this reduced firing of the safety gaps. (You can see that they are only lit dimly instead of the massive power arc in the previous pic.) I also cured the arcs from the capacitor bank by swapping the two wires over so the hot one was furthest from the frame.

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The first sparks ever	Fluorescent tube zapping
It worked first time! I took a long exposure of the coil in action. You can see the streamers coming out to about 18". The topload I used (a metal salad bowl) has a sharp edge on the underside that causes early breakout, so I get a lot of short streamers, about 6 to 8 at a time. If I were to smooth it off somehow, I would probably get fewer, longer sparks, but I'm happy with the results so far. The light coming from behind the base is caused by the primary spark gap. One of the safety gaps on the transformer fired during the photo, causing the bright dot to the bottom right. The metal grid on the floor is a big piece of wire mesh I used as an RF groundplane.	Here is a 20 watt 3' fluorescent tube getting some red-hot Tesla action. The sparks are jumping about 15" and the tube is lit brightly enough to see by. I put a pointed metal object (ok it's a spanner) on top of the coil to direct the sparks towards the victim. When I took this picture I had removed the earth wire from the main spark gap, this reduced firing of the safety gaps. (You can see that they are only lit dimly instead of the massive power arc in the previous pic.) I also cured the arcs from the capacitor bank by swapping the two wires over so the hot one was furthest from the frame.