400 kV Tesla dropped in my mailbox today..

Hmm... If the sparks are bright blue-white and nasty sounding/snappy, you've most likely got the guts of a stun gun, not a Tesla Coil. A small HV inverter charges a small HV cap which is then discharged through the primary of a HV pulse transformer. Peak short-circuit discharge currents can be ampere-level, and peak open-circuit output voltage is likely in the 30-50 kV range...

Bert

The wire spacing and insulation are not compatible with 400 KV.

I'm going to guess several tens of kV max out of that little device.

My last tesla coil topped out at around 3 foot arcs drawing just under a kilowatt. Voltage was unknown but it's safe to say it was in the 100+kV range. The voltages people claim in the tesla coil/free energy world tend to be grossly exaggerated.

Like my "200W" speakers that run from a 9V 200mA wall plug transformer.

I want to harvest that 200W and then I can run 100 more speakers and get a free 20kW power source.

--sp

On a sunny day (Wed, 05 Mar 2014 14:40:32 -0600) it happened Bert Hickman wrote in :

Right, so all I need now is some needles and wires and springs... :-)

On a sunny day (Wed, 5 Mar 2014 22:19:41 +0000 (UTC)) it happened Cydrome Leader wrote in :

Cool, I'd like to do a real big one, but too much stuff here that can get damaged.

They really aren't as destructive as you'd imagine at first, unless you're using your scope probes as some sort of wand to draw arcs.

The effect of my last coil was zero on the video camera, and computers just 12 feet away. The scope connected to antennas and ground current taps did not blow up, nothing did.

The noise and stink is really going to be the problem you face. Contrary to what one might expect, a propery tuned coil isn't as loud as an improperly tuned coil. The spark gap makes noise, but under proper conditions the entire thing just hums and buzzes.

My quarter crusher was a different story. That attracted people from around the neighborhood to investigate the sounds (sounds like a rifle).

OTOH the seller states that if the buyer is not 100% "sasifated" he can get his money back. They seem trustworthy. ;)

Maybe Pyle Audio made the Tesla coil. That would put it's true output around 20KV, which is a simple matter of throwing a lot of windings at a transformer.

I opened up one of those electric fly swatters and found a very tiny transformer that can manage 2KV p-p from 3V in flyback mode. The waveform is a total mess from stray inductance and capacitance but it works with just the right feedback gain.

I don't think it matters what the wave form looks like to kill a fly! :)

Jamie