First posted February, 2008
My first trip to the lab site after ground was broken. This site is extremely remote, but the contractor assured me he could build on top of this mountain. However, getting concrete trucks up the dirt track with sometimes 60 degree slopes was a challenge (so I heard)... I was glad I was not there when the slab was poured, the concrete company would never have delivered if they actually knew where the trucks were going... My contractor conned them with a bait and switch, and after driving over 100 miles to deliver, the truck drivers found they had another 10 miles of off-road, mostly 4-wheel drive track to get up... Or they had to take their loads back.
Contractor and crew working hard to get me under a roof. Weather, labor, the site location, and delivery of construction materials to this remote location delayed the completion date by about 6 weeks and I arrived ready to move stuff in, but only framing was in place.
With the roof up I was ready to start unloading. Due to the heavy equipment required for a Tesla lab, I had a 1 ton overhead hoist included in the construction plans. Photo shows unloading of a flywheel Lister type 20 HP diesel engine for powering the lab. I specified a flywheel engine for this lab because as Tesla noted, you can rob a few thousand HP for a fraction of a second off a flywheel.
After another trip and more unloading... Power cabinet, coils, homemade caps, etc. have made it inside. The black cylinder thing in the foreground is the linear inductor core I designed and built to ballast the main transformers... Wound with cable, and raised and lowered by the overhead hoist it will provide the current control once things are powered up.
RF ground leaves the building through a slot cut in the steel siding. Once outside the building I am making high-Q connections to this RF ground terminal.
As I said, this location is extremely remote... There is nobody for miles around. I chose this location because I did not wish to be disturbed, and I do not wish to disturb anybody... After Tesla coiling intensely when I was younger I started getting tired about the complaints, cops, fire dept etc... If it did not happen to me, it happened to someone I knew while I was watching them make noise and sparks. Serious research, especially at the power levels I like to run, really requires a lab in some out of the way place. And speaking of power levels... I can do this research with a table-top system under one KVA... Tesla coils function the same, regardless of size... The problem is prospective buyers of new technology like this don't have much imagination... A table-top demo will not impress them no matter how good the presentation... If you want to impress, best to scale the systems up, throw at least a few killowatts into it, leave the gaps unshielded, and make them wear hearing and eye protection.