Sort of related, but mostly not: I was involved with the film crew that did Metallica's 3D movie back=20 in 2012. I got to see a *lot* of interesting things. The stage set included 4 huge Tesla coils. I spoke with the operator=20 of those units but unfortunately don't recall most of the=20 details. But what I found interesting (and really liked) was that=20 each of these Tesla coils had a twin-strand optical fibre connection=20 for control. The hand-held control box had connections for all 4=20 Tesla coils and there was apparently some hand-shaking that went on=20 to ensure that un-corrupted data was being sent *and* received by the=20 control box before the Tesla coil would fire up. Seriously cool stuff! dwayne At 03:50 PM 1/21/2015, Denny Esterline wrote: >As an empirical datapoint... >Some years ago I had a car that repeatedly burned out coils. Put on a new >coil, it runs fine, a couple hours to a couple days later it would be back >to no spark and a new coil would put it right again. >After more than a little troubleshooting, it was discovered that the >ignition pickup coil (sensor) was malfunctioning and causing "extra" spark= s >when the rotor in the distributor was not pointed near one of the >terminals. With nowhere to go, the voltage would build up until it found a= n >insulation weak spot inside the coil and flash-over. After enough of those= , >you end up with a nice conductive carbon path inside and no more sparks >outside. >Moral of the story - the internal insulation will fail at some point. > > >-Denny --=20 Dwayne Reid Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd Edmonton, AB, CANADA (780) 489-3199 voice (780) 487-6397 fax www.trinity-electronics.com Custom Electronics Design and Manufacturing --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .