Remnants of The Past: The First Project, The First Tesla Coil

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This is a Remnant of The Past, the first project that started my journey on the road of electronics. The thing you see above is the first Tesla Coil I ever built, and the first project ever having to do with electronics. This project started sometime after I started my first year in high school, looking back it has already been 5 years since then. It all started when the younger me had watched several videos on YouTube about Tesla Coils, it was the music capabilities and the beautiful form of electricity that had enticed me to wanting to build one myself. I went on a frenzy searching how to build these things, from Instructables to forums, anything that could give me the knowledge. I started learning basic electronics like resistors, capacitors, inductors, ohms law, how to read schematics etc. it took me a long time…probably a year to get the basics down, I was probably still biting more than I could chew. But who cares? I still continued until it was completed sometime during my second year. I turned it on for the first time, only to have the circuit board hail fire, capacitors explode in my face(thank god I had goggles at the time) and more mayhem. The cycle of repairing, researching, exploding just kept going on…rinse and repeat until…..it sparked…just for a few seconds then once again it failed. This spark gave me hope that I could do something bigger than I what I was, however I kept on repeating the cycle to no avail, it didn’t want to work no matter how I tweaked it. I eventually gave up but promised I would pick up this project up again. Even though it ended in failure, that very spark had jump started my enthusiasm for electronics, countless projects like my second Tesla Coil(which still failed btw) would be executed, sometimes in failure but also sometimes in success.

Well enough of my sentiments, here are some of the project details:

The Tesla Coil driver is based on Steve Wards SSTC: http://www.stevehv.4hv.org/new_driver.html
No topload, only that screw you see in the photo
The secondary coil is approximately 60 cm(2 ft) tall with 30ish AWG copper wire
The primary coil is that bottom beige colored part.
The H Bridge used IRF740A mosfets instead of IGBTS

That’s pretty much all I remember, I can’t find my old project files or anything else related to it, it’s all but a remnant of my past.

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