Hi there my name is Mike Tucknott & my mates name is Dr Brian H Le Page, we’ve known each other since school (some time ago). Even at that age we got up to dodgy electronics and chemistry (fireworks/smoke bombs/etc).
So when Brian called me from university about some high voltage stuff called a Tesla coil he’d come across on the internet that looked cool and dangerous all in one go, we just had to build one.
Over the years Brian & his dad have been great acquirers of junk, so we had a good start with a power supply and caps (we blew the caps to hell).
I wound some coils on 1 1/2" pipe one 18" long and the other 24" long and built an RSG, the motor for this came from a radio controlled model car (read- very slow and no torque). It was a work of art, it took me all day to make.
When we fired some juice through it, it worked but only for about 2 seconds at which time the wood burned through and it gave up the ghost (and no output from the coil whatsoever). After reading some & getting an idea why the thing didn’t work we came up with the BM1, which as the pictures show worked.
All of our coils are known as BM ? etc (Brian & Mike). This is only so we know which one we are talking about on the phone.
In the future should come magnifiers, home built transformers, proper rotary spark gaps, tube coils. I also want to build a Marx generator.
This was written some years ago and as such we now have a very good working magnifyer coil and a proper sync rotary spark gap complete with a fully working phase controller.