20/08/2005 – Debugging the coil.
After lashing the coil and main tube together on a chipboard base, i carefully applied power to all the right places and….
Nothing !
Oh dear. I thought.
After a lot of headscratching and email burning between the members of the Tesla group, I decided to strip it down an start again. It turns out that I had inadvertantly shorted the tube plate straight to the power supply, bypassing the primary coil altogether !
If I were using silicon devices, I would no doubt have a big pile of junk on the table by now, but Valves being relatively indestructable, it did start working when I fixed the error. First output was pretty small, about 1 to 2 inches but at least the device worked, and the oscillator could be easily tuned to the resonance of the coils. Outside this point, there is no output at all.
