I'm thinking about building a Tesla coil?

Friend, if you have no grounding in high-voltage electronics, I'd take out some life insurance be teslacoildesign.com/ would be a good place to start, although the principle is easy. In a nutshell, it's feeding a coil of a few tens of turns at most with high frequency high voltage, from, say a neon sign transformer (the most popular and easiest power source, although you could theoretically use a flyback transformer from a CRT with only the highest voltage terminal connected, or even build your own resonant circuit). Inside this coil, there's a much denser coil of several thousands of turns, one end connected to ground (and a stable ground at that, preferably through something physical, not just a wire, as there will be voltage, and lots of it), the other end connected to your terminal of choice, usually a toroid (for the best magnetic field distribution).

I repeat, do not attempt this without any grounding in high-voltage physics and electronics, or you will quite possibly electrocute yourself, and burn down the place with an overloaded wire in the walls.

Here's a bunch, several have in depth build logs with schematics: hackaday.com/2010/01/13/vacuum-tube-tesl..." rel="nofollow">hackaday.com/2010/01/13/vacuum-tube-tesl... hackaday.com/2008/06/12/singing-tesla-co... hackaday.com/2010/01/13/vacuum-tube-tesl..." rel="nofollow">hackaday.com/2010/01/13/vacuum-tube-tesl... hackaday.com/2009/08/14/solid-state-tesl... hackaday.com/2008/12/07/tesla-coil-guita... hackaday.com/2007/09/26/make-your-own-ja... hackaday.com/2007/07/07/battery-powered-....

I've made one for school last year. Well they work really simple, just google tesla coil scheme on google images ;-) You make them sing by producing sparks at the same frequency of the music. For nice music make sure you've got a small coil, not to big, not to big sparks, else it won't give nice sound.

You must use a fiberglass cable if you don't want to fry your audio source. You can either use midi or mp3. If you don't want to make them yourself you can buy a kit on: zeusaphone.com/ (at least you could last year, don't know now).

You find a lot of singing tesla's under the name of zeusaphone I found out last year many creators aren't that helpfull about sharing info about it. In general it uses a transfo to go from 230V or 110V (depends on where you live) to something higher (like 2000 or 5000V). Then you can choose: either the capacitor in series and the spark gap in parallel or the other way around.

Both should work (I only tried one last year). Let's say you put the cap. In series.

Then when you power the source on your cap charges, when it's loaded, you'll get a voltage peak. This will cause a spark to jump over the spark gap which changes the flux of the primary winding (a few big windings). Like in a normal transfo the second coil will get inducted by this change.

The cap. Refills itself and it starts all over. Now that second winding has a huge amount of windings, this will result in a voltage of a few 10000s of volts.

One side of this secondary winding should be placed in the earth or should be connected to the ground (the real ground, not the one of your outlet! If you'll do that other machines that are connected with a ground could get broken). The other end should be in the air.

When the voltage is up to those 10000s of volts it will want to find its way to get rid of it. (think of it like static electricity of a thundercloud) the coil will do the same. And you'll get a spark that although you might not see it will travel to the ground.It's like it shorting itself true the air.

Now the last step of it, you might know that bridge that collapsed by resonance, or you might have heart that military people are forbidden to march when they are walking on a bridge. Well the reason for this is that every surface and object has a self-frequency. When you are on the swing and you're being pushed on the right time (the interval is the self-frequency of the swing) you'll notice you get higher and higher.

The same happens with the bridge, if you walk at the right speed and the interval between the steps is the same as the self-frequency of the bridge the energy will be added to the previous energy level. And all that energy can make it collapse. Now the toroid on top of the secondary coil does the same.

It make sure the extra power (when the spark jump over the sparkgap) kicks in on the right moment. This will make the electromagnetic swing of the secondary coil go higher and higher. The result is that your sparks can carry far enough to short true air.

This is a very simple way of telling how a coil works. But it's a tricky project. The sparks won't kill you (normally) because there is this thing called skin effect (look it up on google) but the electromagnetic force that is released is enormous.

Nicola Tesla had a small coil that he used to control the first RC boat ever using those sparks, the first radio stations let there coils spark at RF rate so people could listen radio true the electromagnetic changes made by those sparks. And I know people who fried their neighbors TV by putting his coil on. Military installation kilometers away can here noise produced by a coil of less than a meter high (size doesn't matter, resonance does).

Anyways, all i'm trying to say, be carefull with it. There is a reason why I never made mine resonate for more then 60% ;-) hope this late answer helps.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.