Finished Tesla coil

Tesla coil ready for exhibition.

Short test video of the coil setting paper on fire.

Video from Tesla building

More Tesla build pictures

Tesla coil , a set on Flickr.

We had another night of Tesla coil building. This time all circuits were tested and power applied for the first time.

Laser cut Lego compatible gears

Yes I do occasionally make stuff out of Lego. At some point I got annoyed that i only had up to 64 teeth gears and decided that i could make my own.

 For some other project I bought the excellent Gear template generator from woodgears.ca
After a bit of experimenting i found the parameters for making Lego compatible gears:

Tooth spacing: 3mm
Addendum: 0.350

When machining gears to exactly the measurements produced by the program you get a remarkably good fit.

Tesla 2012

Tesla coil , a set on Flickr.

A while ago i was asked to make a Tesla Coil for an exhibition about Nikola Tesla. I have previously experimented with traditional Tesla coils (Archive). These were loud, dangerous and not really public friendly devices.

A new generation of electronically controlled solid state Tesla coils have been emerging over the last couple of years and we decided that one of these were better suited for public display.

A side effect of the electronic control is the ability to play music. I find this feature rather corny but it seems to be a real crowd pleaser.

Here are the result of the first build night with my long-time Tesla buddy Marc.