mega vacuum tube tesla coil updates

I apologize for slacking on updates but I plan on making up for that this week! This past month has been surprisingly busy for quarantine, and there's a lot I'm working on (not all YouTube related)

For today's post I wanted to give some updates on my huge vacuum tube tesla coil. Progress has been slow but steady on this one. The worst part about a project like this is waiting on parts to arrive. Right now I'm just waiting on some silly bolts to show up so I can finish the cooling system, but everything else is dependent on that so it's sidelined again. It would help if sellers on eBay would stop faking their location when selling me these simple parts :p at least a week isn't as bad as the several months I had to wait on the tubes/caps to arrive from Russia and Ukraine.

Now for some technical details. That monster capacitor bank only has *7nF* of capacitance, with a voltage rating of 30kV. Why on earth would I need such a massive capacitor bank for such little capacitance?? Since those capacitors are going to be used in the tank circuit of a monster Tesla coil, that means the circulating RF power is going to be enormous. It turns out, these soviet K15Y/K15U caps are the ONLY affordable doorknob caps with explicit RF power ratings on them, so I use them exclusively when I need high power handling in CW resonant RF circuits. There's a reason they are so huge for their capacitance, they are meant for use in massive transmitting circuits.

I wish other parts of this project were as clear as the tank circuit, as I'm really working in the dark on this one. Before I started building Tesla coils, I assumed most of the work would be doing calculations, but I've learned that this hobby is really more of an art form, and getting this coil to run properly is going to take a lot of trial and error.

Stay tuned and thanks for all of the support!