Air Core Joule Thief

[jkassis]

I put together Patrick Kelly's "preferred" form of the Joule Thief circuit with the recommended 10cm coil wound on paper over a pencil. Here's my coil winding video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0kUVSlXtKk&t=27s

No luck getting this to ring yet. Any recommendations? Not many variables here so i feel like I'm doing something stupid.

[jadaro2600]

Air cores have a tendency to be a good bit higher frequency. May be it is outside the resonance for the transistor.

[Dog-One]

Not many variables here...

For certain, core saturation cannot happen with an air-core inductor.

What this means is you can pour in amperage until the wires glow
and the magnetic field produced will continue to increase.  The
question is, when you drop the current, will the magnetic field
collapse so hard and so fast it drags-in some external magnetic
field you can get an energy gain from?

By the way, I enjoyed watching someone with dexterity and
mobility wind coils the way I used to do before I wore out.