Amberley Teslathon 2004

Venue : Amberley Industrial Museum
Location : Amberley, Sussex
Date : 19th June

___The Amberley Teslathon is over for another year, you can see pictures and video from this year's event below, and also on Mike Harrison and Derek Woodroffe's websites.

___Adrian Fretwell brought along his nicely constructed 4" conventional system.
___The system was powered by a pair of 10kV 60mA neon sign transformers, and produced sparks up to about 40". Adrian's next project is a synchronous rotary spark gap, which should unleash yet more spark length from this system.

___www.topgreen.co.uk/

___Adrian's coil is built around a solid wooden frame, which makes it quick and easy to setup and transport.

___A Richard Quick style spark gap and a surplus Maxwell pulse capacitor form the tank circuit.

___Colin Heath brought along his interupted solid state Tesla coil. Whilst still only at the prototype stage, this coil produced a range of discharges from a sparkgap-like 100pps, to near CW. Operation was punctuated by occasional explosions as the FETs suffered from Colin's enthusiasm.

___www.geocities.com/colinheath2002/

Photo by Mike Harrison

___MPEG Video clip of Colin's coil (599kB)

___Derek Woodroffe brought along half a dozen coils of varying size and type, ranging from, probably, the world's smallest spark gap coil, to a table top magnifier and the UK's second working OLTC.

___To the left you see Derek simultaneously operating 4 of his coils.

___www.roffesoft.co.uk/tesla

___Derek's OLTC, capable of sparks up to 20", and it plays tunes as well!

___MPEG Video clip of Derek's OLTC (671kB)

___Derek's tiny battery-powered SSTC, driven by a pair of gate driver chips, no FETs or IGBTs needed.

___Derek's table top magnifier system, driven from an OBIT, complete with tiny rotary spark gap.

___Derek's microscopic coil, with Dr. Pepper bottle for scale. The base of the coil contains level-shifting circuitry, tank capacitors and spark gap, with only the high voltage power supply external to the coil.

___Mike Harrison's faithful Marx generator, now putting out a full 1,000,000 volts between towers. This system created sparks up to 4 feet and a noticeable charge on anything near it.

___Tim Davy's large Van De Graaff generator produces sparks up to 20". Visitors enjoyed being charged up by the machine as well as Tim's various demontrations. The video clip below shows what happens when a stack of foil cake tins are placed on the machine...

___MPEG Video clip of the Van De Graaff (807kB)

___The museum have a room full of assorted high voltage equipment and test gear, including a 250kV marx generator, a Tesla coil and large Jacob's ladder.

___Driven by a 100kV 10kVA DC power supply, the museum's Jacob's ladder runs hissing, snapping sparks to the top of a pair of rails 5 feet high with ease, even at half voltage.

___The museum have a 10" classic coil, built by Tim Davey, which is used for demos to the public. Enclosed in the small viewing area there is only room for a fraction of the spark length it is capable of, but the flaming hot discharges and roar of the asynchronous gap are more than enough to leave visitors impressed.

___Both of the toroids used on this coil are made from fibreglass, the lower one plated with a 0.5mm thickness of pure copper, the upper painstakingly covered in aluminium foil tape.

A sign from the museum's large collection.

Once again the magic smoke got away.

___Pictures by Nick Field & Mike Harrison

___Words by Nick Field