Not-Musical Tesla Coil

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This tesla coil was a lot of fun to build.  It is the first coil that I have ever made.  I am pretty sure that I built this one before I came to college, though I don't remember for sure and failed to document it thoroughly.

It was nice to build because unlike my DRSSTC, I did not need to tune the primary circuit.  The primary circuit is just a coil of speaker wire (10 turns or so) driven by a half-bridge.  In fact, I didn't need to tune any oscillator (555, etc.) to a proper frequency.  The resonant frequency of the secondary is determined by using an antenna and some logic as feedback circuitry.

One thing that I would take note of is how close ANYTHING is to the secondary.  In my experience with tesla coils, the secondary is sacred.  If it gets even the slightest ding, arcs will likely breakout from that point.  Also, if anything conductive is close to the secondary, you could have arks break out from the secondary windings to the conductive object.  I had this happen to me on this tesla coil; arcs broke out from the secondary winding to the heatsink for one of my MOSFETs.  I thought that the secondary would be irreparable - it usually is because it will always have a higher tendency to break out from that scorched point for all eternity after it happens once.  I fixed this, though, by sanding off the blackened scorch mark and layering polyurethane over that area.  I also moved the MOSFETs further away from the secondary.  I haven't encountered this problem since!

Anyway, I would check out Steve Ward page on his Mini SSTC if I were you.  I had lots of fun building this coil.