Deep fried neon is a great site with a lot of the equations I used to get the shapes and sizes in the right order of magnitude. Hopefully it will work!

Here’s a video of my driver circuitry working with a spark gap:

And here’s a photo of my secondary that I wound with the help of Scott, my Tesla coil mentor:

I’ve just made a prototype former (one of four) for the primary coil and ordered the copper tube for it.

Next up I need to: build a stand, install the primary, build a secondary top load. Then it should be testing time!

My calculations are available here.

The rest of my photos are here.

Thanks to Rachel Coldicutt for the invite!

Check the photos here.

One of the great things was that we were all able to trade ideas and experience. For example; Scott let me use his tesla coil winding gear and showed me how to make a decent secondary coil for my tesla project. I helped Dave and Stuart put together my solar rainbow makers and polargraphs.

What seems to work well is to have a well formed idea to investigate, or a mostly finished project that can be easily duplicated by other people. Another thing we might try next time is to collectively solve a problem that we would all benefit by. An example is that none of us know a cheap and reliable radio link we can use with computers and microcontrollers.

In this update I’ve improved the looks by removing all the visible cut marks on the top surface. Another tiny improvement is etching the start and end of the maze on the “key” that comes with the box. This makes sure a new owner knows where the ball starts and ends.

Design and buy a box here!