TCBOR Teslathon 1998

The Tesla Coil Builders of Richmond held its 9th annual Teslathon on September 26th at the home and lab of Richard Hull. The festivities hosted 53 people in all. The usual Friday night get together, this time, took its cue from the Rochester Teslathon and pizza was ordered in as about 20 Pre-Thoners had a good evening of demos and informal discussions.

The day of the Teslathon was a beautiful, sunny day with temperatures in the lower 80s. The Tesla fleamarket began in the morning around 10AM and ran until about 3PM. Among the items that were sold were Tesla capacitors, transformers, variacs, vacuum pumps, lasers, high energy magnets, spark gaps, chemical elements, toroids, vacuum tubes, scientific books, plasma tubes and Tesla coils themselves. This is the fourth year in a row for this highly successful, formalized, flea market. The comment was made that this was much better than a hamfest as the material had already been filtered through the “junk sieve” resulting in a high concentration of just purely Tesla and HV related “stuff”. Another TCBOR first which has really helped link people with hard to find items.

All the time, Tesla coil demos and firings were taking place in the lab as Hull and others demonstrated a number of interesting high voltage related items. A lot of discussion groups of 3-6 people would congregate and ad-hoc talks were given at the blackboard on topics of great import. Catered food was cooked and served on site at 4PM with hot dogs, hamburgers, corn and normal picnic fare. The usual 200 plus sodas were consumed over the entire day.

Featured demos were Magnifier #11E, a hydrogen thyratron powered TC, and a bell jar Fusor - (Hull), stainless steel chambered Fusor and Marinov motor demos - (Tom Ligon), Talks on Lichtenberg figure production - (Kim Goins), Dirod Electrostatic Generator - (Kevin Dunn). Mark Rzeszotarski had a nice poster setup with photos, crushed soda cans and text describing electromagnetic can crushing. The evening talks were given by Jock Fugett, head engineer at the Hampton Virginia based Continuous Electron Beam Acceleration Facility (CEBAF- recently renamed - “Jefferson National Laboratory”). Richard Hull spoke on the Farnsworth Fusor team's original effort of the mid 1960s and offered a slide show and video tapes.

The rest of the evening was spent again in informal talks, magnifier 11E firings, and folks just lounging in lawn chairs in the cool evening and night air outside the lab. A full day of decompressing was needed by Hull. Kevin Christiansen, ex-TCBOR member, now hailing from Pennsylvania, kindly came by and helped clean up on Sunday morning prior to striking out for home.