Hello! Today I’m going to show you how I build a Tesla coil! Probably you may know this device from computer games, movies or some “music tesla show” whatever they call it. If we ignore the mystique around the Tesla coils, it’s just a high-voltage resonance transformer working without a core.

Circuit of the coil, as you can see it’s very simple and we need only a few components. Also, we need a frame for secondary coil, it’s could be any dielectric cylinder diameter of approximately 2cm and length of 20cm.

Let’s begin from the most complicated part – secondary coil. It has 200-1500 turns turn to turn, I am about more than 500 turns. Fix the beginning of wire and wind, actually, you don’t need to count every turn, simply multiply the diameter of the wire to a number of turns you planning to make – it’s going to be your winding length. When you did fix the wire with some tape or better by couple layers of varnish.

The primary coil is much easier only 3 to 10 turns of regular wire in PVC insolation. Next is soldering, all under the circuit, PCB is not necessary. Connect primary and secondary coils, and give 12-volt dc as Input. So we have done. Before you turn on the power at the first time, put CFL near to the coil, because usually you’ll not see high voltage sparks immediately and only thing notice that it’s working is the light bulb.

It’s quite a weak coil, and you can not get electrical shock because of skin-effect, but anyway be careful and don’t place any electronic devices such as cellphones, computers etc. near to the working coil and notice that high voltage sparks are made of plasma and it’s actually very hot, be careful when touching it. If Tesla coil doesn’t work, try to flip wires from the primary coil, usually, it helps, also you can try to add or subtract a couple of turns from it.

Now let’s talk about improving results, first you can do is raise voltage, but I don’t recommend going over 30V at this circuit. Second is playing with primary coil, logic is simple, fewer turns – more current equal more power and more hitting, I stopped at 3 turns. Please see the full video for tesla coil project circuit diagram