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UK winter Teslathon, Cambridge 30th Oct 1999

Many thanks to Bob Golding for organising this event at the Cambridge Museum of  Technology. The steam engines provided a rather fitting backdrop for our activities! MMCs were definitely the order of the day, and we set what we think is a new unofficial British record of 82" sparks using Mike Tucknott & Brian Le Page's MMC coil. Then the breaker tripped and all the lights went out!
New! There are now some  AVIs and frame sequences of stuff exploding.
See http://www.tcbouk.org.uk/ for more info on UK teslathons past and future.

Bob Golding's coil

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Steve Crawshaw's coil. Note steam piston in background!

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My coil, as usual running better than it does at home. The white vertical blob bottom right is a transformer safety gap running in "jacob's ladder" mode.

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Mike Tucknott & Brian Le Page's coil (more images at bottom of page)

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(Left) Gordon Forrest's plasma globe made from laboratory flask, with flyback power supply. This was run with a vacuum pump, producing low-pressure air discharges. (Right) First attempt at double-exposure of me getting zapped - better paint the ground rod black next time!

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When it stopped raining, I set up my 120uF 5KV cap bank outdoors. After crushing a couple of cans and  levitating a hard-disc platter onto the roof, some water (2 images below) and wire was exploded, and for an oncore, a soggy tea-bag was blown up. Fortunately it was nearly fireworks night, so the loud bangs didn't attract too much attention....

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Exploding a couple of feet of thin copper wire. This image has been edge-enhanced to highlight the shower of molten wire fragments disappearing in all directions. The loop of wire went from the terminals at bottom-right to the top of the plastic bottle & back.

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(left) Pairs of frames from two digital camera movies of exploding wire. (right) Remains of exploded wet teabag. Click here for more frame sequences of stuff exploding.

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Video sequence of exploding wire. Click Here for AVI movie with sound (97K) Click here for another exploding wire movie (76K)

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More images of Mike & Brian's coil.

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The two images below were taken with a Casio QV5500 digital camera, in 'night scene' mode, which forces a long exposure (0.25 sec I think).

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