Go ahead and come into the garage, that humming noise is just my bench grinder… I would love to have this Tesla coil. One of these days I will sit down and put one together. I can only hope it will be half as nice as this one from WardLabs.

“After this series of failures, I decided it was time for a bit more investigation. After much research, I realized that my secondary was all wrong (477 turns, 22ga wire), my wires were too thin, my bottle capacitor bank was too big for my NST but too small for my MOTs. So, I re-designed my coil extensively and waited until I got all the necessary parts.

FINALLY, I got everything together, and had assembled the coil with much care, but I was still waiting on my 30AWG wire! So, while biding my time, I turned to taking apart some broken monitors I had scored at the dump. I got to looking at the degauss coil and realized it had 30 guage wire in it!!! Hastily, I weighed it and realized I didn’t have enough wire to make a full secondary, but was itching to know if it would do something. I also thought that I might learn something before building my permanent coil. I didn’t have another PVC tube of good size, so I wrapped it on a 1 1/2″ piece until I ran out. I wound up with about 1370 turns.”