Some of you on this forum might have built a tinyTesla, which I always thought was a really small cute SSTC. One thing I was especially fond of was the small secondary coil it uses which are pretty hard to make by hand since they are wound with very thin wire. I had one tinyTesa secondary coil, so this motivated me to build a QCW tesla coil with it to see how much spark I could get from this small coil.
![](./styles/abbcode/images/youtube.gif)
Another goal of the project was to make a very small QCW coil that could easily fit on top of a table, but still have good performance and be 'plug and play' easy to operate. The size restriction was that it needed to fit into a medium size USPS box (!). The result is a very compact coil, yet capable of sparks just over 32" or so despite its small size (more than 13x secondary length!).
![Image](https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/648/22938155292_f24be30921_c.jpg)
Photo of the coil on my messy bench.
![Image](https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5631/23060147845_607f4927ce_c.jpg)
And of the coil in action.
Coil runs with a 340VDC bus with 4 TO-247 IGBTs. I'm using a pretty fat bus capacitor though I could probably replace that with a bunch of smaller ones and make the coil even smaller!
Enjoy!