Davinci

Introducing the newest conventional Tesla coil to join the family. Davinci, which was built to be a portable... coil. Well I can tell you this, its anything but portable. The idea was to have a nice display coil to use for demos and educational classes. It's performed well over the last year until we pushed it a little too hard and over coupled the darn thing. Oops...

The rotary gap here is really the crown jewel of this coil. If only it worked properly haha. It looks beautiful and the engineering process behind it was extensive, however there is a huge problem with the motor being used. This rotary gap was initially designed as just a ASRG, but when a sync motor became available the initial design went out the window.

This gap is actually about 700 man hours of work. The entire gap was built using Solidworks and then transposed into masterCAM in order to load these designs into a CNC machine to precisely machine them. As you can see the results are astonishing, but all is for nothing if your motor doesn't funtion properly.

It turns out this motor was a hystersis motor instead of a salient pole motor. In other words instead of this motor running in the same position each time it spins up, this motor will shift its position of sync which makes it esentially useless for syncrnous operation. There is however a fix to this problem. Many people have used the John Freau motor controller in the past with excellent results. This allows you to shift the phase of the motor during operation. However a slightly cheaper and more dangerous option is just unpluging and replugging the gap during operation till you acheive that syncronous hum.

I dont recommend this at all, but until I get a controller built its the only solution I have.

More to come soon