Tesla Coil DIY Kit, PEMENOL Touchable Plasma Ball Spark Gap Arc Generator

the components list said 12 pc 45uf capacitors but only were 2pcs 45uf and 11 pcs 35uf capacitors that are not on the components list , the instructions have no wiring diagram or ledged , the package was not good and looked like it was seriously rattled , many times . I repackaged it nicely but I would not accept the components being different from the components list

I bought this because it was a kit. By my standard, a kit contains everything you need to complete a project successfully and is arranged to streamline the process. I have built Tesla Coils without “kits “ successfully. This was the first kit I ever tried and I have yet to get it working. The instructions are more of a hindrance than anything. I was more often confused by what was being said and had to rely on my knowledge and experience to figure out what was actually supposed to be happening in each step. There are no specs provided which makes tuning difficult. When I first assembled everything and excitedly energized the primary circuit, I had one single arc from the spark gap and then nothing. I’ve had to troubleshoot similar behavior in the past so I swapped the primary polarity and nothing happened. I suspected component failure but this far everything that I check seems to be functional still. I’m a little mind boggled now. I will likely ditch the included primary circuit (that is 90% of the time spent in this project) and make my own. If you want a beginner friendly experience or a kit that simplifies your build process, keep looking.

EDITED:: PEMENOL saw this review and reached out to me to assist with my troubles. I asked for a basic troubleshooting guide However, at this time they do not offer that with the kit. To compensate for my trouble, they offered me a credit to my account. The rep were very helpful and courteous and timely with their replies. I won’t edit the review further, because I do believe that others may experience the issue, and unfortunately with any product, there is a certain percentage that may have defects. 3 stars now, just based on Their great customer service was simple and straightforward and simple however, their wire measurements are totally incorrect. There isn’t even 30 cm of transformer wire total on the fly back transformer and the rest can you cut it off and use part of it ended up buying 30kV rated 18 gauge wire for the project. Assembled the clunky(but still did its job) Wooden stand, And adjusted the spark out to 1 mm. Once I energized the product, I had a steady spark rate of about 60 Hz, one per second. No matter the spark gap I could not get the pulse to increase or decrease. This thing definitely is pushing some obscenely high, yet very satisfying voltage off of the secondary! I only ran it for about 30 seconds on, 30 seconds of all the time so as to not overheat or stress out any of the poor quality Chinese electronics. With less than a total of one hour time energized, it stopped producing spot across the gap. Upon disassembling and testing of the flyback driver and transformer l i determined i had an open capacitor in the bank. I will be buying 20 capacitors from my own supplier this time, and running two banks of 10 in parallel, to double my capacitance and make this thing utterly terrifying when it discharges, ive designed and assembled an insulated and light shielded adjustable ignitor So the gap can be adjusted under energy, and the show stealing light produced by the sparked up isn’t show stealing. Good project for novice to intermediate electronics Enthusiasts looking to add to the world of hi frequency high-voltage excitement. If you do not know what you’re doing, or you have no basic understanding of ohms law or electricity, do not do this project without guidance of someone who has training!!

This is has a very bright spark gap, and it's loud. You really know you are working with some power when it is operating. First, soldering is required. It's easy, it's fun, but if you don't know how then order a learning kit at the same time and build it first. Also, look for online instruction and videos in addition to the learning kit. I built half of mine with lead-free and the other half with leaded solder for practice. You will need hot melt glue. You do not have to use hot melt glue but gluing sure is fast and easy if you do. You will need a way to scrape or sand a little enamel insulation off of some wires. Finally, you will need a way to put some small holes through micro plywood. I suppose punching might work, but drilling is easy and accurate. I think there was enough wire in the kit to build it, but it was easier and cheap to add some solid conductor of my own. I used 18ga, which seemed about right for building the capacitor bank and as a longer ground wire. Again, all of the parts were easy, with no super tiny soldering connections. I'll start with what I had to go back and redo. I did not notice that the two ends of the main coil are finished differently. One has a wire that wraps over the end of the coil. This wire needs to be in contact with the stainless steel ball. There is no need to remove insulation; you will have all the volts you need to punch through the enamel on the wire. The other end of the coil has the wire that you thread down through a hole that you made in the upper micro plywood. This end will need to have some enamel removed because you will be soldering it. The second mistake I made was how I built the capacitor bank. The thin resistor leads will not handle the current and actually glowed orange in a dark room. That was pretty cool looking, but I knew I had to add heavier wire. The manual showed the capacitor leads bent over and soldered to the next capacitor. I decided it was a bit cleaner at that point to add some of my 18ga Cu wire, and it worked great. One more item, my flyback transformer had fewer pins than the one in the manual. I followed their pictures for which wire to connect where and it worked The instructions indicate an optimum voltage of about 19VDC at up to 80watts. 80 W divided by 19V = 4.2 Amps. There are plenty of 12VDC power supplies that will power it. You can also use a 12VDC gel cell, or car, or motorcycle battery. Interestingly, a little bit stronger laptop power supply is perfect and low cost on Amazon. Many of these are around 19V at up to about 4.2A. Higher amps are OK, so are higher volts. The instructions indicated 12 to 36VDC, 60 to 80W. For operation, I mentioned that it is loud. You will easily be able to hear it in an average bedroom or classroom. The brightest spark is the spark gap. I think the circuit uses power transistors to oscillate, providing alternating current to the first step-up transformer. The spark gap is a tunable high-power way to generate the high frequency and high power used to drive the main coil. The first test I did was to check for noise on an AM radio tuned between stations. It was pretty fun to hear a friend on a cell phone tell me they could listen to me clicking the kit on and off 200 ft away! I guess this might operate similar to an early Marconi transmitter. You are probably wondering if you can feel the voltage. I could, it was unpleasant, so I avoided getting too close to the output. The answer depends upon the frequency, and in a kit, the output can be a combination of high and low frequency. High enough frequency, and you cannot feel it. Lower and you do feel the electricity. But do not touch the spark gap when it is operating. When you see the bright spark and hear it, you won't want to. However, the main output coil can produce big, long sparks but be difficult to feel when there is no low-frequency energy in it. Regarding the voltage, I could make a fluorescent light fixture tube glow up to about 3ft away. I would keep sensitive electronics away from it. I used a cell phone for the pictures, and it worked well. Regarding the pictures, you should be able to hear the spark superheating a thin thread of air. There are two types of high voltage phenomena producing light. First, the air is an insulator; the electrons are tightly bound to the atoms. Think of voltage as pressure, or push force. When the voltage is high enough, it forces electrons to flow, producing the lightning spark you see. This review will get way too long if we explain all of the interesting concepts, so I'll stop here. I used 1-2-3 blocks from Amazon to aid in constructing the spark gap. You can't adjust the gap when it's running, but that's where you tune it. So plan for access later. For the capacitor bank, I hotmelt glued the caps together, then soldered the interconnecting wires, then hotmelt glued the module to the provided board. As mentioned above, do not rely only on the resistor leads for capacitor interconnection, as my picture shows. Do as the kit instructions show and use capacitor leads, or add your own heavier wire and solder the connections. I had my reservations about gluing to the end-grain of the dowels. After some research, I discovered that some people recommend hot melt glue for end-grain, and it worked! I'm careful when handling the device, but so far, no problems. Besides, I built it; I can re-glue it if I ever needed to. Although this has modern parts, it is kind of easy to imagine working in an old wooden laboratory with Tesla, in a darkened room where you can see the sparks better, and with the sounds of high voltage. It inspired some online research where I learned some things and had fun doing it.

Not a bad product, some of the instructions aren't as clear and you have to download them. I think the company puts a piece of paper with a barcode link you can scan to download the instructions digitally. You will need a power supply. Review Ohms law if you are not familiar because the instructions don't give exact detail about how much voltage the circuit boards with resisters and capacitors can handle, so be wear and take caution. I had to purchase more wire because the wire you are given and the measurements in the instructions that it calls for is definitely less. Pemenol's Customer services is good. I would give four stars but it was quite a hassle getting through the confusion of the instructions. Could just be to language barrier. Not bad for a DIY project. Parts could be a little better.

I always wanted to have a Tesla coil, probably has to do with growing up in the 1960’s and liked watching sci-fi movies, so when I saw this kit on Amazon, I had to buy it. I read a few reviews before buying it and being a fairly experienced kit builder I was confident I could build it successfully. I did use a few tips that were mentioned in the reviews. The first thing you have to do is scan the QR code and download the instruction manual. I found it to be very complete, first numbered instructions and then instructions with step by step pictures to identify the components and show the proper orientation. My kit contained everything except the 30 cm of ground wire, and hot glue. You can use any wire, single conductor small gauge, can even use some speaker wire if you have any laying around. My transformer was exactly as pictured in the instructions. The 100uh choke was already prepared with the leads stripped and tinned. I followed the instructions exactly as written, except for a few steps. As mentioned in other reviews, I hot glued all the capacitors together in the configuration shown in the instructions before soldering them and adding the resistors. I used crazy glue and screws to assemble the wooden frame and dowels, instead of hot glue. To strip the enamel insulation off the wires I used a razor blade to scrape off the enamel and then used 150 sandpaper to do a final cleaning. It’s very important to get it all off for a good solder joint. The place I deviated most from the instructions was for the primary and secondary coils. When I saw how thin the secondary transformer wire was (30 ga) I followed a tip from a review. I very gently scrapped off the insulation and used sandpaper to clean the secondary wire. I used a 4-40 screw, nut and 2 washers to secure the thin wire instead of soldering the 30 cm ground wire to it. I first hot glued the secondary coil centered on the top piece of wood. I drilled a 1/8 hole where the secondary wire came out from under the coil. I then put the secondary wire under the washer and on the under side of the board I attached the 30 cm ground wire under the washer, then tightened up the nut, this removes all stress off the 30 ga secondary wire. Then I hot glued the Primary transformer core to the board, centered over the secondary coil. I drilled a 1.5mm hole for one side of the primary winding from the spark gap to go through the board, wrapped the one turn around the form, hot glued in place, then drilled another 1.5mm hole for wire to go back to the capacitors. I used an old Dell laptop power supply, 19.5 volts, 6.7 amps. I first adjusted the spark gap to around 2mm and attached the ground wire to a 7” carpenters speed square that was laying on the work bench. I plugged the power supply and it worked! A very bright, loud spark was generated at the spark gap. I was able to light a fluorescent bulb from about 1 foot away and create about a 2-3” spark. I am pleased with this Tesla coil kit and had a good time building it.

This kit is easy to build. But the instructions were incorrect for the parts that were delivered. The wire they said was in the kit was not supplied. After completing the build it would not work. There was no support from the company for my questions. I tested and replaced parts and found thy transformer that was supplied in the kit was bad. I replaced it with one of my own and everything works now. To expensive of a kit to be supplying my own parts. Especially the transformer which is the most expensive and important part of the kit.

Updating my review based on recent experience. If you want something to "just work" I would not recommend this kit. But if you are up for a challenge that will force you to learn then this might work. My 13 yo son assembled this on his own, but mistakenly connected the earth ground wire to the ground of the power supply which quickly fried the resistors in the capacitor bank. After replacing them and verifying everything worked we got the coil working well. We started off running it for short periods like 30 seconds at a time, but it failed on the last round and it does not work anymore. It turns out the transformer was fried. And this is my main problem. I’ve killed 2 transformers already and have only used this coil for about 3 minutes in total. I am an electrical engineer so can debug the circuit but it would not be obvious to anyone who does not know the fundamentals. I also wish they included more details such as a schematic, the # of turns on the transformer, and the # of turns in the secondary coil so that we could calculate the output voltages. I finally received some specs from the supplier so that was helpful, but it took weeks of back and fourth.

looks good, bigger than I imaged, with detail instructions and many big capacities. haven't start to solder it but hope I have good luck.

Il y a beaucoup des pièces manquantes. Très déçu

The instructions clearly have been translated from another language to English through google translate. For example, here’s step 7: «Treatment a Coil Inductor» Another example is where I’m still trying to figure out the meaning. Step 12: «Reserved the left pin which marked ‘-‘ next red case and remove another pin». Do they want me to remove the positive pin from the flyback transformer?? Another thing to consider before buying is that you’ll need a high wattage soldering iron to solder most components because the board itself works as a heatsink, which makes it almost impossible to solder properly with the average solder iron (It creates cold joints).