304TL Vacuum Tube Tesla Coil

This page is the area where I explain some of my projects I am currently working on, as well as those that have been completed in the very recent past but are relevant still. Any questions about them are welcome and can be submitted by way of the feedback page and will be answered in some way or another... After searching far and wide for an appropriate vacuum tube to use for the VTTC, I finally was given a 304TL as a gift. This soon proved to be a perfect tube to use for the tube coil.

I finally got around to building my tube coil, using a 304TL tube instead of either of my other two. This is the very first photo of the tube coil running, using a fork as a topload. I definitely need to do some impedance matching and tuning and whatever else, but it's doing great so far. This is the Tesla coil tube running, with no power being drawn on the plate. Good looking picture of the 304TL coil discharge. This is the last run before the critical improvements resulting in the great leap forward in performance.

This is after the improvement, changing the grid leak resistance from 10kΩ to somewhat less than 2kΩ, and the primary down to 18 turns. I haven't tuned it yet. Part of my setup, where you can see my homemade socket for the 304TL. If you look carefully, you can barely see the filament glowing. The tube filament glowing after powering off. Me playing with a fluorenscent light with the 304TL coil turned way down.