Went to dance class last night, first time in _ages_; it turns out that the Demand class most demanded was Hustle! Fun, hustle is a blast and the music is all kinds of cheerful. The '80s was a time of cheerful music, definitely. Disco was embarrassing in many ways, but you just can't beat it for perkiness.
I poked around my garage last night trying to find a flyback transformer that I know I should have, but it's gone. Must have vanished in the massive cleanup of '07.
I then fired up one of my Neon transformers; it makes a pleasant, quiet spark, and seems to arc and Jacob nicely even at 1/3 power in. I'm sure it will make a fine electrical effect, an improved spark wheel and/or Jacob's ladder.
I did some rough tests on a new effect I wanted to try, but no success yet. I still have options, though; however, I think the winning option will be "massive high voltage".
Still doing researching, learning about Tesla coils. Found a guy locally who wants to make one, and he has found OTHER guys locally who HAVE done builds, so it would be prudent for me to call him and work with that group.
There are conflicts in what I want in a device, so I may have to make several. An optimal Tesla coil is running at a specific frequency, at resonance, which is how it amplifies its output.
A musical Tesla has to vary its output, though, to make music; however, if resonance is high enough it won't contribute to the tone really, so then you just do modulation over the resonant frequency; that is, a slower musical waveform to gate the higher frequency driving signal.
Then again, different effects entirely can be had by changing the frequency and duty cycle of the driving signal, but then you aren't running in resonance -- so those effects are better done using a more standard high voltage transformer (e.g. the flyback I couldn't find).
So I'll have to build a variety of things.
I also want to play with electrifying fire, and the manipulating that with magnetism. This won't require Tesla, might even be do-able with just the Neons. We'll see.
Fun fun!
And speaking of which, this weekend I have an art welding class, a games night, work on the fire pillar, and I promised Alamo I'd make a flame thrower for them as well. Busy!