DIY Tesla Coil

[Becky]

I got Ian a DIY Tesla coil kit for Christmas, and he got it up and running this week!

It's the Tiny Tesla kit from OneTesla: https://onetesla.com/

I'll let him tell you more about it, but here's a video of it in action.

This is only at 15% power, so it's likely we will be able to get bigger sparks. It is the sparks that are making the sound - that's not just a weird backing track

Also if you have any suggestions for tracks to play we'd love to hear them!

 

[Abarbarian]

wow some present.

How about

 

[muckshifter]

 

[Taffycat]

What an awesome present!

 

[Taffycat]

Ooh.. just remembered this one... might make a good candidate for the Tesla treatment.

 

[Ian]

I'm going to hunt down the MIDI files for those tracks later on and give it a shot when it's dark .

Building it was great fun - thankfully the kit included all of the components, so all that was required was a lot of soldering, gluing and assembly. All in all, it was probably 5 hours of work to build it and then another few hours troubleshooting some initial problems (arcing from primary to secondary). I have to admit, I was a tad nervous when powering it on for the first time - it's the first time I've build something mains powered from the component level.

 

[nivrip]

How about....................

 

[Ian]

Thanks for the suggestions folks . I tried to download some of the midi files to play tonight (now that it's dark outside), but it gave me an error about midi channels. I think the midi files that I downloaded from the tesla coil site have been arranged to work well on the tesla coil, so I'll need to edit these a little (to add notes to channel 0).

 

[floppybootstomp]

This whole concept is completely new to me, never seen that before.

btw, which Christmas is it a gift for - 2015 or 2016?

Howzabout:

Watch this vid to learn just how naff fashions were in 1974

 

[Becky]

btw, which Christmas is it a gift for - 2015 or 2016?

Christmas 2015... What can I say, it's been a busy year!

Nice suggestion by the way!