[huwston (OP)]

does anyone have a simple way of making a tsla coil, i have read instructions on the internet but im not an electrician, is there a way of instructing how to build one so than ANYBODY can understand?

[daveshorts]

I don't know about building one, but I can explain roughly how they work which may help you understand other people's designs.

A Tesla coil is very basically a transformer, you put low voltage (240V) into a coil with a few turns, this produces a changing magnetic field which induces a voltage in each of the tuens of the secondary coil. because there are an awful lot of turns in the secondary coil, these add up to a huge voltage which will do all the cool stuff. The top of the secondary coil (which normally looks like a brown tube because the wire is so fine) is then connected to the sphere/doughnut at the top which is very gently curved so as when it sparks it sparks more spectacularly.

[diagram=101_0]
Blue primary coil, red secondary, grey ball at the top - sorry it is rubbish

Although plugging the primary coil into the mains would produce a higher voltage on the secondary than mains it wouldn't work very well because air cored transformers are not very efficient at mains frequencies, so they normally build a high frequency generator to plug into the primary coil. There are lots of other optimisations involved with not making it spark in the right places, and building things that resonate correctly to maximise their efficiencies etc.

If you are interested in building one I would go to one of the Tesla coil builders of the UK events
http://www.tcbouk.org.uk/
and talk to some people about it. They are very nice guys and if you seem interested they are very helpful.

[huwston (OP)]

thanx for the effort of explaining as best u could, but im not in the habit of creating potemtially lethal devices from nursery diagrams.lol
no offence.

cheers for the link []

[Soul Surfer]

An induction coil produces high voltages in a transformer by interrupting a magnetic field.  The Tesla coil interrupts a magnetic field to create an RF oscillation which is then boosted to a high voltage by the transformer the sparks have a different quality from the induction coil sparks and can be much longer and less shocking because they are rapid oscillations and travel over the skin surface.  The also create loads of radio interference.