Starting on the Primary Coil

Spent the last few weeks decorating the lounge, those of you who have followed my blog may have spotted the rather flowery decor in some of the pics, for this I apologize but can now confirm that the decor is a little more up to date. Now onto the primary. As per the original plans from Tesslastuff.com I acquired a fifty foot length of 1/4' copper tubing. This can be sourced from many places, I picked a well priced listing on ebay from a seller with a healthy feedback score.

I have spent a long time deciding on the final design of the primary coil, the plans from Tesslastuff.com give you the basic idea and all the correct measurements but, as usual, I wanted to enhance the design with my over engineering. After reading several blogs and coil build diaries there seemed to be two ways to help prevent primary coil strikes (streamers hitting the primary coil- not good). Firstly to fit a ground rail around the primary and secondly to completely cover the primary with a non-conductor. So I decided to do both.

Above is my solution to covering the primary coil. It's a 5mm thick perspex disc with an external diameter of 900mm and an internal diameter of 170mm. The cut-out allows the secondary coil to pass through and as this disc is prominent I want it to be aesthetically pleasing so paid extra for the inside and outside edges to be polished. Here's another pic to give you an idea of the disc size next to the tesla base (room still with old decor).

I would also need some way of supporting the copper tube spiral of the primary. Most people used strips of plastic with evenly spaced cut-outs with accepted the coils of the primary. The coils were secured with glue or by zip ties. I didn't like the idea of glue cos of it's general messiness which doesn't go well when combined with lovely clear perspex. The other option of zip ties just didn't look that good. The best looking install I saw was to use nothing to hold the coils in place. The coil passes through holes drilled in the supports, very neat but a lot harder to achieve. I ordered the material needed for the supports.

These were 8 pieces of 250mm X 30mm X 10mm clear perspex with the top and bottom edges polished.