Winding Form Tubes On Hand:
1. A 6 inch outside diameter, 24 inch long 1/8 inch thick acrylic tube.
2. A 6.5 inch outside diameter, 26 inch long 1/4 inch thick PVC tube.
3. An 8 inch outside diameter, 35.5 inch long 1/8 inch thick acrylic tube.
4. An 11 inch outside diameter, 46 inch long 3/8 inch thick PVC tube.
Tubes 1 and 2 will both be wound with 27 AWG magnet wire (approx. 1400 turns for Tube 1 and approx. 1525 turns for Tube 2) and will be compared to each other to show how much of a difference the tubing material makes. This difference may increase with thicker wire.
NOTE - I had to get rid of tubes 2, 3, and 4 in 2007 because I had too much stuff in my home! Only tube 1 is becoming a Tesla coil!
CONSTRUCTION STATUS:
Tube 1 was completely wound with AWG 27 magnet wire on 7/4/2005. I have not yet done anything else. This will be moving slowly since I have other things that I have to do!
For now, I intend to make an end-feeding power oscillator that will work with any of these coils. The power oscillator will self oscillate at the frequency at which the coil has its main "series resonance" (resonance where impedance is low). The coil will basically be a compacted helical 1/4 wave antenna.
The oscillator will be an amplifier plus some means to sense the current being fed into the "low" end of the coil (or returned from "house ground" to the amplifier circuit board ground). A voltage derived from this current will be fed into the input of the amplifier.
UPDATE 9/22/2008: I now intend to soon get some Cirrus Logic MP108 power opamps for this coil, to drive it by low impedance primary feed method, in a self-oscillating scheme.
I still need to get a top electrode for this coil. At this moment, the coil still has its top termination being the end of the AWG 27 magnet wire. If this wire is tucked into the top end of the secondary and bent upward so that its end is pointing upward, centered on the coil axis, and level with the top of the winding or a little lower, there is no corona at a peak voltage of 50 KV.
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