Breadboard Bits - Tesla Coil

Introduction

It seems that Tesla Coil building is something that every electronics geek has to do at least once. So here's my attempt at doing just this.

Please don't take this as a tutorial. I'm quite new to building these monstrosities. I'll be pleasantly surprised if it works at all.

Since I'm actively building it right now, this page will likely change quite substantially over time. The editing and chronological coherence will become better as time passes.

Secondary Coil

The laboriously wound secondary coil.
Since I set up my electronics bench again, I've been able to start tinkering again. Unfortunately, I haven't unpacked my machine tools yet, so I lack a coil winder or the equipment to build one.

Not one to let things like that stop me, I wound the secondary coil entirely by hand. It's just a dispenser bottle, covered in double-sided carpet tape, and wound with approximately 1200 windings of 34AWG copper magnet wire.

Needless to say, it took all night, and still lacked the nice clean look of a machine-wound coil. Still, this should give me something to play with, at least until it flashes over and self-destructs due to the pathetically small wire gauge.

More parts

Various parts involved in the next stage. Visible are the plexiglas base plates, the toroid forms, and the double-boiler for safely melting candle wax.

At this stage, the plan is something like this. A faraday cage will be formed, most likely of aluminum mosquito mesh, between the two plexiglass base plates. This will serve as a shield for the drive electronics, when this system is eventually powerful enough to warrant such precautions.

The topload will be a pair of toroids, the bottom one smaller than the top, made of foam coated with aluminum foil.

I decided to wax the coil mostly to provide mechanical support, since the coil is not as tightly wound as I would like. A standard wax double-boiler (made of a pair of cheap pans) will allow me to form a pool of liquid wax in which to roll the coil.

I still have to decide on a shape for the primary coil.

Mockup

Mockup of the final coil. Note that the mechanical supports are not actually present yet, and that the tower is just sorta... standing there.
After another few hours of messing around, here is a mockup of what the finished resonator might look like. The toroids seem to be okay, although they are currently neither mechanically supported nor electrically connected.

My attempt at waxing the coil was an unmitigated disaster, ending up with a slightly sticky secondary and wax-encrusted double-boiler bits. The double boiler is not long enough to allow the coil to sit inside, which led to my ill-fated attempt at pouring the wax. The wax did not penetrate between windings and easily flaked off. At least recovery was made easy.

That said, I still haven't given up on the idea of a waxed coil. I just have to do something different next time around.