From: "Barton B. Anderson"
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 19:12:40 -0700
Subject: Re: [TSSP] Secondary in motion
Hi Paul, My experience with racing arcs almost always started between the top and 1/4 down from the top of the coil and would race down the secondary. Many times, the racing arc would break away from the secondary and travel to the strike rail. This occurred about 1/3 from the bottom of the coil. At one point, the coil shorted a turn at about 10" form the top (43.25" winding length coil). I eventually fixed and flipped the coil over. This may have been due to a strike rather than a racing arc phenomenon. I remember back in MN a particular run where the coil ran just fine until I hit a particalar power level. At that moment, all hell broke loose and the coil profusely produced racing arcs. Not all went strait down the secondary. Some actually appeared to skip along the length of the coil. I powered down and tried it again. Sure enough, at a certain power level (unknown) all hell broke loose again and then I heard a bang. The coil was silent. I blew a 1/2" hole in the line filter casing. Removed the line filter and went though a few tuning exercises and all was well. No more racing arcs. The problem was tuning due to using a couple different toroids and not spending enough time in the tuning department before turning up the juice. I haven't seen dust or debris causing the problem. I've had racing arcs with a very clean coil. My coil after a lot of mishaps is quite "pointed" at spots now than it was back when I was having racing arcs and now I'm not getting racing arcs. I'm also running without the strike rail. I feel tuning is a major contributor possilby due to the what Terry mentions in the next paragraph. > Racing arcs also tend to occur more on mistuned coils. I assume that is > because the voltage is "trapped" in the secondary coil more and does not > get out to streamers as easily. Btw, loved the first movie but couldn't run it on my pc at home. I took it to work today and viewed it. Hopefully, I'll find a player that will work on this old pc so I can view these at the same time the rest of the group is. Take care, Bart
Maintainer Paul Nicholson, paul@abelian.demon.co.uk.