My wife Leslie and I (Bert Pool) went to New Zealand in late March, 1998 on holiday. While in Wellington, I had the pleasure of visiting with Malcolm Watts, well known and respected Tesla coil researcher. Malcolm treated us to dinner, and entertained us with a tour of his lab and a demonstration of his coil and some of the testing and research he is conducting on conventional coils and magnifiers.

[87k]Malcolm Watts standing next to his medium conventional coil. What is interesting is that this coil is space wound with 0.1 mm wire - I had to get very close and prove to myself that the coil was indeed space wound!

[102k] The coil in its entirety.

[65k] Malcolm Watts (left) and Bert Pool in the frenzy of coiling talk. Photo courtest of Stan Swan.

[100k] Part of Malcolm Watts' lab.

[85k] Spark gap, along with chokes. The capacitor is a dry poly unit - 0.1 ufd.

[81k] 1.5 kva lab transformer, converted to Tesla coil use by hand winding a heavier primary with a few less turns to increase the turns ratio. Still, the transformer only puts out about 7.5 kv.

[34k] Magnifier waveform - showing characteristic ringdown identical to a conventional coil.

[34k] Magnifier waveform - time base stretched out to show detail.

[34k] Magnifier waveform - time base stretched out to show first and second peaks only.

[34k] Magnifier waveform - time base stretched out to show first peak only.

[34k] Magnifier waveform - time base stretched out to show detail of first peak only.

[91k] Small maggie used to generate waveforms for Malcolm's storage scope .

[94k] Tiny impromptu maggie based upon minature coil.

[90k] Minature coil built and sent to the States.

[71k] Resonant line using several inductors and capacitors used by Malcolm to test some of his ideas on distributed capacitance in a real coil.

[79k] Test resonant line connected to storage scope, signal generator, frequency counter.

[97k] Sparks in New Zealand - a perfect dessert.

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