Tesla Coil DIY Kit, PEMENOL Touchable Plasma Ball Spark Gap Arc Generator for Physics Teaching, Arc Plasma Artificial Lighting Science Experiment Model for College University Education

The media could not be loaded. This is has a very bright spark gap, and it's loud. You really know you are working with some power when it is operating.First, soldering is required. It's easy, it's fun, but if you don't know how then order a learning kit at the same time and build it first. Also, look for online instruction and videos in addition to the learning kit. I built half of mine with lead-free and the other half with leaded solder for practice. You will need hot melt glue. You do not have to use hot melt glue but gluing sure is fast and easy if you do. You will need a way to scrape or sand a little enamel insulation off of some wires. Finally, you will need a way to put some small holes through micro plywood. I suppose punching might work, but drilling is easy and accurate.I think there was enough wire in the kit to build it, but it was easier and cheap to add some solid conductor of my own. I used 18ga, which seemed about right for building the capacitor bank and as a longer ground wire. Again, all of the parts were easy, with no super tiny soldering connections.I'll start with what I had to go back and redo. I did not notice that the two ends of the main coil are finished differently. One has a wire that wraps over the end of the coil. This wire needs to be in contact with the stainless steel ball. There is no need to remove insulation; you will have all the volts you need to punch through the enamel on the wire. The other end of the coil has the wire that you thread down through a hole that you made in the upper micro plywood. This end will need to have some enamel removed because you will be soldering it.The second mistake I made was how I built the capacitor bank. The thin resistor leads will not handle the current and actually glowed orange in a dark room. That was pretty cool looking, but I knew I had to add heavier wire. The manual showed the capacitor leads bent over and soldered to the next capacitor. I decided it was a bit cleaner at that point to add some of my 18ga Cu wire, and it worked great.One more item, my flyback transformer had fewer pins than the one in the manual. I followed their pictures for which wire to connect where and it workedThe instructions indicate an optimum voltage of about 19VDC at up to 80watts. 80 W divided by 19V = 4.2 Amps. There are plenty of 12VDC power supplies that will power it. You can also use a 12VDC gel cell, or car, or motorcycle battery. Interestingly, a little bit stronger laptop power supply is perfect and low cost on Amazon. Many of these are around 19V at up to about 4.2A. Higher amps are OK, so are higher volts. The instructions indicated 12 to 36VDC, 60 to 80W.For operation, I mentioned that it is loud. You will easily be able to hear it in an average bedroom or classroom. The brightest spark is the spark gap. I think the circuit uses power transistors to oscillate, providing alternating current to the first step-up transformer. The spark gap is a tunable high-power way to generate the high frequency and high power used to drive the main coil.The first test I did was to check for noise on an AM radio tuned between stations. It was pretty fun to hear a friend on a cell phone tell me they could listen to me clicking the kit on and off 200 ft away! I guess this might operate similar to an early Marconi transmitter.You are probably wondering if you can feel the voltage. I could, it was unpleasant, so I avoided getting too close to the output. The answer depends upon the frequency, and in a kit, the output can be a combination of high and low frequency. High enough frequency, and you cannot feel it. Lower and you do feel the electricity. But do not touch the spark gap when it is operating. When you see the bright spark and hear it, you won't want to. However, the main output coil can produce big, long sparks but be difficult to feel when there is no low-frequency energy in it.Regarding the voltage, I could make a fluorescent light fixture tube glow up to about 3ft away. I would keep sensitive electronics away from it. I used a cell phone for the pictures, and it worked well.Regarding the pictures, you should be able to hear the spark superheating a thin thread of air. There are two types of high voltage phenomena producing light. First, the air is an insulator; the electrons are tightly bound to the atoms. Think of voltage as pressure, or push force. When the voltage is high enough, it forces electrons to flow, producing the lightning spark you see. This review will get way too long if we explain all of the interesting concepts, so I'll stop here.I used 1-2-3 blocks from Amazon to aid in constructing the spark gap. You can't adjust the gap when it's running, but that's where you tune it. So plan for access later. For the capacitor bank, I hotmelt glued the caps together, then soldered the interconnecting wires, then hotmelt glued the module to the provided board. As mentioned above, do not rely only on the resistor leads for capacitor interconnection, as my picture shows. Do as the kit instructions show and use capacitor leads, or add your own heavier wire and solder the connections.I had my reservations about gluing to the end-grain of the dowels. After some research, I discovered that some people recommend hot melt glue for end-grain, and it worked! I'm careful when handling the device, but so far, no problems. Besides, I built it; I can re-glue it if I ever needed to.Although this has modern parts, it is kind of easy to imagine working in an old wooden laboratory with Tesla, in a darkened room where you can see the sparks better, and with the sounds of high voltage.It inspired some online research where I learned some things and had fun doing it.

Absolute crap. Missing parts had to get replacements to have all the required parts. Didn’t work at all like the video. Being an engineer and built one that was less complex w out a kit and worked fine. This again was not with working modules

!!For all those trying to find the construction manual for this kit go to : “Additional info>User manual pdf” it’s there.One can miss it easily with so much product info dump. Good luck building it.

I always wanted to have a Tesla coil, probably has to do with growing up in the 1960’s and liked watching sci-fi movies, so when I saw this kit on Amazon, I had to buy it.I read a few reviews before buying it and being a fairly experienced kit builder I was confident I could build it successfully. I did use a few tips that were mentioned in the reviews.The first thing you have to do is scan the QR code and download the instruction manual. I found it to be very complete, first numbered instructions and then instructions with step by step pictures to identify the components and show the proper orientation. My kit contained everything except the 30 cm of ground wire, and hot glue. You can use any wire, single conductor small gauge, can even use some speaker wire if you have any laying around. My transformer was exactly as pictured in the instructions. The 100uh choke was already prepared with the leads stripped and tinned.I followed the instructions exactly as written, except for a few steps.As mentioned in other reviews, I hot glued all the capacitors together in the configuration shown in the instructions before soldering them and adding the resistors. I used crazy glue and screws to assemble the wooden frame and dowels, instead of hot glue. To strip the enamel insulation off the wires I used a razor blade to scrape off the enamel and then used 150 sandpaper to do a final cleaning. It’s very important to get it all off for a good solder joint.The place I deviated most from the instructions was for the primary and secondary coils. When I saw how thin the secondary transformer wire was (30 ga) I followed a tip from a review. I very gently scrapped off the insulation and used sandpaper to clean the secondary wire. I used a 4-40 screw, nut and 2 washers to secure the thin wire instead of soldering the 30 cm ground wire to it. I first hot glued the secondary coil centered on the top piece of wood. I drilled a 1/8 hole where the secondary wire came out from under the coil. I then put the secondary wire under the washer and on the under side of the board I attached the 30 cm ground wire under the washer, then tightened up the nut, this removes all stress off the 30 ga secondary wire.Then I hot glued the Primary transformer core to the board, centered over the secondary coil. I drilled a 1.5mm hole for one side of the primary winding from the spark gap to go through the board, wrapped the one turn around the form, hot glued in place, then drilled another 1.5mm hole for wire to go back to the capacitors.I used an old Dell laptop power supply, 19.5 volts, 6.7 amps. I first adjusted the spark gap to around 2mm and attached the ground wire to a 7” carpenters speed square that was laying on the work bench. I plugged the power supply and it worked! A very bright, loud spark was generated at the spark gap. I was able to light a fluorescent bulb from about 1 foot away and create about a 2-3” spark.I am pleased with this Tesla coil kit and had a good time building it.