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Hi Mario, I'll assume that you were using an insulated disk type rotary and that you are not getting any direct flashovers or creeping sparks from your Tesla Coil's HV primary circuit back into the motor shaft or housing. Is your rotary gap physically located near or under the coil? Any wires that are in the vicinity of your coil will become antennas, picking up stray near-field RF from your coil. The longer the wire length the greater the voltage. If the induced RF voltages are not safely bypassed to ground, they may find alternative, less attractive, paths to ground. RF arcs can start fires, mains "follow-through" currents can cause short circuits or fires, and stray RF can back up into your house wiring and damage sensitive electronics equipment. Verify that your RF and mains grounds are all properly connected and that they are not connected together. The RF ground from the base of the coil will typically have several hundred, sometimes thousands, of volts of RF depending on your coil's output level, the integrity of your RF grounding system, and the length of wire connecting the resonator base to your ground rods. Any longer lengths of lower voltage wire going between your controller and peripheral devices need to be bypassed. This can be done by passing them through commercial EMC filters or connecting them to 0.5 uF (or larger) 600 volt capacitors to mains ground. Use a three-wire power cord or use a shielded twisted pair cable with the shield earthed, between your controller and the rotary gap motor, and connect the motor's case to mains ground. RF pickup on the lines to a remote rotary is a very common problem on larger systems - bypassing these via EMC filters or bypass caps should do the trick. Good luck and best regards, -- Bert --
: I just fired my six inch coil up and I recieved a shock through the cord that
: feeds my rotary gap. It was only the 110v but I got a good one. Luckily
: the wires at the motor ignited and cut power. I am just wondering if you
: have any ideas as to what caused this to happen. I can only guess that the
: wires were not insulated enough or possibly to close to where the gaps on
: the disk were firing. I have used this gap and power source (10KVA PT)
: many times before and never had a problem. The only thing different was
: that I did not have my variac connected this time. Thanks Mario
:
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