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

This kit is easy to build. But the instructions were incorrect for the parts that were delivered. The wire they said was in the kit was not supplied. After completing the build it would not work. There was no support from the company for my questions. I tested and replaced parts and found thy transformer that was supplied in the kit was bad. I replaced it with one of my own and everything works now.To expensive of a kit to be supplying my own parts. Especially the transformer which is the most expensive and important part of the kit.

!!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.

Updating my review based on recent experience.If you want something to "just work" I would not recommend this kit. But if you are up for a challenge that will force you to learn then this might work.My 13 yo son assembled this on his own, but mistakenly connected the earth ground wire to the ground of the power supply which quickly fried the resistors in the capacitor bank.After replacing them and verifying everything worked we got the coil working well. We started off running it for short periods like 30 seconds at a time, but it failed on the last round and it does not work anymore.It turns out the transformer was fried. And this is my main problem. I’ve killed 2 transformers already and have only used this coil for about 3 minutes in total.I am an electrical engineer so can debug the circuit but it would not be obvious to anyone who does not know the fundamentals.I also wish they included more details such as a schematic, the # of turns on the transformer, and the # of turns in the secondary coil so that we could calculate the output voltages.I finally received some specs from the supplier so that was helpful, but it took weeks of back and fourth.