Tesla coil

Basic end setup of auto-transformers, salt water capacitors, driver transistors and a battery power source.

HIGH VOLTAGE SPARKING!!! The thing of boys dreams.

This was one of the early electronics projects i did, so be kind. As crude as it was, it actually and surprisingly worked OK. Even with significant losses in the salt water capacitors (bottles wrapped in tinfoil on the right) it was still able to arc a gap of 15mm or so in air and shock the fuck out of you. For 15 year old me that was a win.

The setup is pretty standard with car ignition coils, spark gap, home made salt water capacitors an wound secondary transformer (black tube that makes the sparks), apart form the transistor drivers. I originally made a little 555 timer circuit that produced the signal to control the transistors but i quickly fried it, so i improvised…. In the top left of the picture is an old car sub-woofer amp which i used to drive the transistors. I then had either a laptop or mp3 player (cant remember now) hooked up to the amp producing the correct wave to get he system to run. I would NOT recommend doing this now though. Just a bad idea that somehow worked.

555 timer and driver transistors

Battery, coils, spark gap, salt water capacitors and output transformer

One cool thing i did with it was connecting a large incandescent light bulb to the top of the output. Turned off the lights. And turned on the Tesla coil. It was pretty much a poor mans Plasma Globe. But just for bit of added fun, it would shock you a little bit when you touched it 😛

Another cool thing about it was if you held fluorescent bulbs near it, they would light up.

Year: ~2005