Where to get high voltage wire?

Spark plug wire... Local auto parts store.

-- Clif Holland, KA5IPF AVVid Authorized Kenwood and Icom Service Center

Careful, very often this is a resistive wire with a steel or carbon core to dampen radiation, I think this is not what you want.

ciao Ban

"Joe C" skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.attglobal.net...

Normal Coax with solid PFTE insulation will take *a lot of voltage* - but the inner conductor is thin. This is for the primary right?

Right, primary.

Besides everything else spark plug wire is fat and to have 20 turns of it would take up alot of room on the core...

Joe C.

Well, its not your father's Oldsmobile...

Joe C.

I don't see a need for "high voltage wire" except from the neon sign transformer (and also stay way the hell away). Using regular enameled solid copper wire (probably 12 gauge for primary, maybe 22 or so for secondary), cut two or three pieces the total length you need for your coil. Wind it as a bifilar or trifilar coil, then carefully remove the one or two unused windings and glue down the one remaining. You'll then have enough air space between each turn for insulation. I've heard of this sort of spacing of the coil being used for secondary as well as primary - I recall reading something like a "thousand-plus volts per turn" where enamel insulation on adjacent windings of solid copper wire could break down. As far as things that have 15kV across them, just keep them a couple of inches or more away from each other.

Someone brought a large Tesla coil into the lab at work many years ago, about like your description below, and powered by a 15kV sign transformer (through an arc gap to the primary coil/glass-foil capacitor). The secondary gave 6-inch-plus sparks at not-too-dangerous current, but the primary would surely be deadly. I looked on an oscilloscope ten feet away, just holding a 10-to-1 probe in the air would show 50-volt spikes. There was probably no AM reception within half a mile.

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With the counter help at most stores today that would be correct. If you don't have a year, make, and model they can't find anything.

-- Clif Holland, KA5IPF AVVid Authorized Kenwood and Icom Service Center

Customer: i need 50 Feet of generic high voltage ignition wire. Service Desk: is that for a Corvette or Hyundai ? ;)

Clif Holland wrote:

Here is a nice site

or you could run down to your local neon sign company and buy the wire thier.

I have seen alot of pictures lately of tesla coils and none of the pictures I have seen have a primary like the one I built using plans from the 1965 Popular Electronics magazine!

Regarding the primary, you are right about the wire. After thinking about it I see that the potential difference from one turn to the next won't be 15kv so the wire doesn't have to be high voltage wire because of that. BUT the primary I have is wound on a cylindrical tube like the secondary and of course the wire needs to be insulated from the coil form it is wrapped on.

Is this why all the primary coils I see pictures are spirally wound on single plane vs a cylinder?

Also, does any one have comments on which way to wire the circuit? My old 1964 circuit has the capacitor across the power transformer and the spark gap in series with the primary of the tesla coil. All the schematics I see today have the spark gap in parallel with the power transformer and the capacitor in series with the primary of the tesla coil.

Joe C.

Excellent suggestion! I called a few neon sign places and found one guy willing to sell me 75' of 15kv wire for $30! Great! Thanks for the idea!

Joe C.

snipped-for-privacy@b>Here is a nice site