How to Make Tesla Coil
Nikola Tesla invented many things. Tesla coil was one of them. Nikola Tesla dreamed of creating a way to supply power to the world without stringing wires across the globe. For this, he designed a tesla coil. Tesla coil is capable of doing many things like wireless transmission of electricity, artificial lightning, vacuum system leak detectors, etc.
I like Nikola Tesla and his tesla coil very much. To see the tesla coil’s lightning and wireless transmission of electricity I decided to make the tesla coil by myself.
Although there are many types of tesla coil I decided to make a spark gap tesla coil because its components are easy to find. I made a large tesla coil on the third attempt. Let’s know the working principle and diagrams of the tesla coil and then I’ll describe my all attempts.
Working principle of Tesla Coil
A Tesla coil is an electrical resonant transformer circuit that is used to produce high-voltage, low-current, high-frequency alternating-current electricity. It works on a principle to achieve a condition called resonance. Here, the primary coil emits huge amounts of current into the secondary coil to drive the secondary circuit with maximum energy. The fine-tuned circuit helps to shoot the current from the primary to the secondary circuit at a tuned resonant frequency.
Circuit Diagram of Tesla Coil
This coil has two main parts – a primary coil and a secondary coil, with each coil having its own capacitor. A spark gap connects the coils and capacitors. The functionality of the spark gap is to generate the spark to excite the system. It also needs a high-voltage power source to power the whole system ( at least thousands of volts).
My First Attempt
On my first attempt, I used a 4 lakhs voltage generator because it can produce high voltage and it has a high voltage transformer and capacitors inside it. For the primary coil, I used 4 turns copper wire and for the secondary, I used 800 turns 35 no copper wire. It worked fine arc length was 1 to 2 inches.
My Second Attempt
On my second attempt, I used a ZVS driver and flyback transformer as a high-voltage source. This time I made my own high-voltage capacitors using aluminum foil and plastic sheets. I kept the number of turns of the primary and secondary coils the same as previous ( primary 4 turns and secondary 800 turns). This time it worked better than the previous. The arc length was 4 inches. I was not satisfied with it so I decide to make it more powerful.
My Third Attempt
On my third attempt, I used two microwave oven transformers as high-voltage power sources and 10 high-voltage 4.85 nano-farad capacitors. I have connected the input wire of the 1st microwave oven transformer to the 220v power supply and its output wire to the second microwave transformer’s input and output of the second microwave transformer to capacitors. All capacitors are connected in parallel. This time I have used 4 turns for the primary and 1600 turns for the secondary coil. For the spark gap, I have used two copper strips. This time arc length was very big about 10 to 12 inches.
