Building DS Plasma Globe

[h2ocommuter]

Paul Thanks,
I remember my brother doing that guitar thing.
I remember when they were tuning up they would sot of get the strings into a harmonic balance. I do know what you are talking about.
Not to deviate here because I do believe it is important, I do not have the concept of tuning for resonance yet inside a circuit.  Most of the resonance stuff I have read sounds pretty basic as far as taking readings and measurement and then adjusting them all so the "I will say it my way", mechanical reverberations are in an equilibrium or harmonic balance.
I cleaned up my bench and stray hooked up wires and Satetyfied the operation today, after yesterday getting that huge shock it really sobered me up about this operation.
So anyway after that I probed around to find out how far back the HV went in my circuit. and to my surprise it does go all the way into the feed side of the spark gap. This means it is in my circuit also.  This explains why I have blown all but one of my LED's.

Anyway next to revamping the grounding switch for discharging the caps manually I incorporated the isolation transformer. Now when I discharge the caps the IT is pulsed as DS has said. With another analogue light meter set on the two Hot leads on the output side the meter is lit up.  The lights that are lighting up are the 400 hz and others but this is very premature to make any definitions about it except that point DS made about only pulsing the IT for it to work.

I hope you are viewing the videos as this may help communicate what you see I should adjust in my operation.

Now back to the voltage readings at the input side of the SG;
when grounding the caps the voltages are immediately over 300 upon opening the circuit. "My God I need to be careful".
If this was not an anomaly I will show it on the video

Thanks Paul.

[bw]

nice work h2oc.  good progress.  Paul is right about resonance,  google "energy sucking antenna"  Try tuning your L2 coil with a resistor to match the frequency of the ball, use the charts from the ARRL to find what resistor you need to hit the target freq.

p.s. keep one hand in your pocket, when you get it right it can kill without warning;  Careful Brother. 

[h2ocommuter]

How sad, I fried my massive 400 VDC ammeter.

I was adding perspectives into my databank Brain and came across some novel realizations about capacitor charging and displacement of voltages inside the bank.
While moving onto other information and adding to the databank I progressed from 3 to 4 caps and down to one cap.
The data was interresting and predictable on some values. others were unpredicted and unforeseen. 
This is what snuck up on my operation. as found before, "more space for the magnetic resonance input", the substance moves more easily into storage. So reducing that storage area requires more time to force it in....
At that point of reduction the discharge is more compact in magnetic value so at much lower voltages 300 % increase in amperes is observed. 50 V = 350 A when discharged. At this point I found letting the voltages go to 75 Volts resulted in the ammeter gauge moving so fast that it was nearly invisible pegging, but then as it was returning to zero the movement would slow enough to reapear about half way back. If you would dare to believe it.   Well That did not sink into my thick skull soon enough.  It seemed impervious to these types of discharges. I looked at this gauge many times during these tests and decided to move on to see how much voltage the unit would charge this certain cap. 800V 20.1 uF This discharge fu fu fried it.
This would have been nice device to use to measure output coming out of the IT.

h2ocommuter

[bw]

very interesting findings on cap charge times, thanks for posting.
bw

[FatBird]

@ H2OCommuter,   How sad, I fried my massive 400 VDC ammeter.


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The reason it fried is because the sensitive meter is typically a 50 mV meter (.050 V).  That meter was designed to connect to a High Current all metal Shunt that takes the brunt of the current.  When 400 Amps goes thru the Shunt it produces 50 mV which deflects the meter appropriately.  200 Amps will put out 25 mV to the meter, etc.

The 2 big bolts connect the high current cables and the 2 small screws go to the sensitive meter.  The ends of the Shunt and bolts are Nickel plated Steel & the center part is thick copper plate.

In fact, if you look at your meter real close, you will see 50 mV in very small print.

.