Post-Soviet Tesla Coil Teardown and Test

Tesla Coil Teardown and test of a Post-Soviet era Tesla coil. Hardware and circuit analysis with a spark throwing test. For a discussion of teardown and hardware, come on over to HVF and join the fun 🙂

Tesla Coil Hardware

This Tesla coil teardown revealed a pretty solid build, but with a few bad design decisions. The topload is made from a helical coil of aluminium tubing, wrapped around two discs, to become a vertically wound tube ring toroid. The secondary coil seems to have around 1000 turns and only a few layers of thin varnish. The primary coil is a soft wire put inside a rubber tubing, for insulation.

The bridge uses a full bridge of IGBTs IRGP50B60PDP which are rated for 600 V and Ic 33 A.

The driver uses a potentiometer variable frequency start-up oscillator and a primary feedback current transformer takes over, once the best setting has been found. The ICs have had their markings sanded off, to protect the obvious simple SSTC circuit that consists of a oscillator, a few logic ICs TL or CMOS and two gate drive ICs.