The Ultimate Tesla Coil Design and Construction Guide

Mitch Tilbury's The Ultimate Tesla Coil Design and Construction Guide covers just about every and any facet of electrical engineering data ever put together in one package. If there is anything of importance to this topic that isn't covered, I certainly can't name it.

The guide is written in chapters divided up into various segments pertaining to the design and construction of Tesla coils and resonant high frequency circuits. Each chapter is provided with a list of references where applicable. The chapters include superb drawings, sketches, and graphs to illustrate the points being discussed. Other features offered are a table of contents, list of tables, and a complete index, something which many authors of such publications often fail to provide. Tilbury even includes a brief, but interesting, history of the life and career of Nikola Tesla.

Want to know something about the theory and construction of spark gaps, mutual inductance, coupling, resonant RLC series circuits, effects of terminal capacitances, current limiting and controls, leakage in inductors and transformers, determining parameters of unmarked transformers, damped oscillations, safety, etc., etc.? It's all there, and then some. The book has a companion Web site, which allows the experimenter to follow a course of planning or to resolve difficult equations using the computer files. (You can find this web site at www.mhprofessional.com/tilbury/.) Although I did not run any of the programs, the author provides instructions for those who wish to take advantage of the information contained at this web site.

I characterize this publication as an encyclopedia for coilers at all levels of expertise. Incidentally, there is so much data covered in this book that it defies a review in one reading session.

One thing for sure, this publication is not a set of plans for “How to Build a Tesla Coil” with which experimenters are so familiar. It is, however, a valuable source of information to which experimenters can repeatedly refer for information on just about any facet of planning and building high-frequency apparatus at high potential.

Harry Goldman, President, Tesla Coil Builders Association