simple tesla coil

I’ve been planning to build a tesla coil for a while now. I’ve even wound a secondary for it, but I haven’t gotten around to doing anything else with it yet. My end goal is to set up a spark gap tesla coil with some home made capacitors being driven by my zvs driver and a flyback transformer.

Earlier this week, I saw this youtube video by Keystone Science demonstrating a very simple circuit that will drive a coil. I wanted to see if it actually worked and would produce an arc from my already wound secondary, so I put it together on a breadboard.

My circuit is slightly different since I just used parts I had on hand.  

Yes, that is a binder clip holding a heat sink onto the mosfet.

I wrapped two turns of an inner strand of a cat-5 cable around a toilet paper roll and slid it over my secondary winding.

I don’t know how many turns are on the secondary, but I estimate about 1500 to 2000.

I fired up the power supply and adjusted the potentiometer and I got a small corona discharge, so it looks like the circuit does work.

It will even light up a cfl bulb from about two feet away.