Conner's Build

[conner85]

ok do I'm trying to make the timing light according to this post
Get yourself an LED and connect a 300 Ohm resistor to one leg of it. Add some leads, gator clips work good for this. Connect one side to your primary positive and the other side to the junction where the power wind connects to the board which is at the output diode but not the rectified side of it. The output diode which is connected to the collector right where the coil end connects.

Put a white mark in the center of one of your magnets that you can point the LED at and this will be a simple timing light. Mount the LED on your coil in line with the center core. You will be watching when the coil is firing in relation to the core of your coil. When connected one way it will show you the ON period and if you switch the leads around it will show you the OFF period or the spike side so to say. As you adjust you will see more and less firings of the coil and the position where the mark shows up will change. Play around with that a bit and see what you can observe.

*EDIT*
The resistor value is not critical, you just need somewhere around 300. This is only there to protect the LED so as long as your getting it to light up and not burning it out your fine.
I used a 470 ohm resistor first and the LED wouldn't light so I tried three 100 ohm resistors and still nothing. The LED won't light even if I use no resistors and hold it straight onto a 12 volt battery. I may be exposing my ignorance here but what am I missing?

[Brian McNece]

Possibly, the led isn't good, most leds can only handle around 3-4 volts max, i think that is the reason for the resistor. I could be wrong, however, none of the leds i've seen are able handle 12 volts direct connected.

ok do I'm trying to make the timing light according to this post
Get yourself an LED and connect a 300 Ohm resistor to one leg of it. Add some leads, gator clips work good for this. Connect one side to your primary positive and the other side to the junction where the power wind connects to the board which is at the output diode but not the rectified side of it. The output diode which is connected to the collector right where the coil end connects.

Put a white mark in the center of one of your magnets that you can point the LED at and this will be a simple timing light. Mount the LED on your coil in line with the center core. You will be watching when the coil is firing in relation to the core of your coil. When connected one way it will show you the ON period and if you switch the leads around it will show you the OFF period or the spike side so to say. As you adjust you will see more and less firings of the coil and the position where the mark shows up will change. Play around with that a bit and see what you can observe.

*EDIT*
The resistor value is not critical, you just need somewhere around 300. This is only there to protect the LED so as long as your getting it to light up and not burning it out your fine.
I used a 470 ohm resistor first and the LED wouldn't light so I tried three 100 ohm resistors and still nothing. The LED won't light even if I use no resistors and hold it straight onto a 12 volt battery. I may be exposing my ignorance here but what am I missing?

I stand corrected, i just looked online and sure enough mouser has leds that are rated for 12-14 volts. I had never seen them before. Another thought: be sure you are connecting in the right spot.

[conner85]

Thanks for the advice Brian. The LEDs I have are from Mouser. 95vac 1.9ma vcc lamps. I also have some that are half that size (roughly) and I couldn't get those to light either. here is how I wired it. And a pic of where I am connecting it in the circuit.

[Brian McNece]

Thanks for the advice Brian. The LEDs I have are from Mouser. 95vac 1.9ma vcc lamps. I also have some that are half that size (roughly) and I couldn't get those to light either.[ATTACH=CONFIG]5128[/ATTACH] here is how I wired it. And a pic of where I am connecting it in the circuit.[ATTACH=CONFIG]5129[/ATTACH]

Conner
They look like neon bulbs not leds. They won't come on till they get around 90 volts.

[conner85]

Ahhhh! Yeah that's the problem. I'll try again with a LED and see what I find on the pulse per mag.

[conner85]

I tried buying a small LED at the hardware. They didn't have any so I got a small flashlight bulb. After wiring it up and trying it as a timing light I'm assuming if it's not LED it doesn't work. But now I know that have an electric night light that has a small LED. If I disassemble it can I convert that for dc?

[Brian McNece]

I tried buying a small LED at the hardware. They didn't have any so I got a small flashlight bulb. After wiring it up and trying it as a timing light I'm assuming if it's not LED it doesn't work. But now I know that have an electric night light that has a small LED. If I disassemble it can I convert that for dc?

Mouser has them they are around 50 cents each p/n 859-LTW-2S3D7 or if you are in the us try radio shack.

[conner85]

BobZilla,
Here is a quick update on my 36ah charge batt. I did three full runs, recharging the run batt without discharging the charge batt and got the charge batt up to 14.63. So you were right. It definitely pushed it up over that 13.5 I discharged that batt for 27 hrs on a .57 ma load ending at 12.03 volts. Now I have started the charging process again. This thing will be running night and day except when I'm discharging the batt.

[conner85]

Brian,
Thanks for the heads up on those LEDs! I'll be ordering some tomorrow so I can do some better tuning. I'm not seeing it shift on its own although I can do it manually with the pot. I notice two diff places where the voltage drops. It seems to have a low gear and a high gear. I don't know if I could hit the third spot by shorting out the resistors but I'm afraid of frying something so I'll be content with how it runs for now.

[BobZilla]

Conner that is good news. Like I keep saying just take your time and really study what is happening.

About the LED timing light. I would suggest you get a red and a blue LED. If you wire them up in opposite directions you will be able to see both the charge and discharge of the coil. You will find from close observation that it not only is showing you the timing as in when it fires but also the on time in the forward direction which is also important. What I mean is look closely at the WIDTH of forward direction mark. This will make more sense to you once you have a working indicator in front of you.

[conner85]

Hi again. I finally got my LEDs and did some tuning with them.i had already ordered them before I saw BobZs suggestion on the red and blue colors so I only have one color. I got them on EBay instead of Mousers but they are 12 v so i can use them without resistors and they had 6" wire leads already attached which made it super easy to wire them I'll attach a couple pics of the different pulses. I have to draw about .90 ma to get it to single pulse but JB does say this is a one amp machine. I also thought the charging sped up when tuned to single pulse although it could have been because of the charge batt being at the top end. I've been running this thing night and day as much as possible to work on getting the 20 cycles on my charge batt. It is painstakingly slow though since it takes two cycles of the 334cca batt and one cycle of the two 7ah batts (in parallel) for one full charge of the charge batt. I'll put the pics in the next post.

[conner85]

So these pics show single double and triple pulsing. The pulse is def a lot wider when it's a single pulse.

[BobZilla]

Hi Conner,
That's good you have an LED hooked up now. Not sure if I mentioned it already but you do not want to keep that hooked up all the time, it will steal from your charging. Just use it to spot check. Either put a switch on it or just use alligator clips to connect it so you can turn it off.

So as I was saying with the two leds in opposite directions you would see both directions, that's ok you can just flip your leads around if you want to see the other direction. Since it's a 12 volt you could touch the leads on your battery to see which lead is the positive unless it is marked or color coded already for you. What I am talking about here is when you hook it up in the normal direction you will be monitoring the charging of your coil, if you switch your leads you will be monitoring the discharge of the coil which is the spike. Also since you have a pot on there notice what happens when you adjust a little up or down on the resistance. It will of course change from one spike to two or two to three, you know that already but if you look closely you will also notice the mark getting wider or shorter within these zones before changing to the next spike count.

Anyway your doing great, don't obsess over this but look at it as another tool to help analyze.

[Yaro1776]

Hello Conner,

Been watching your progress and give credit to you for the excellent pics of the spike zones - very nice quality there. As a side note and suggestion, it would be useful to other experimenters if you note the rpm range for each of the spike patterns along with the number of magnets on your wheel. Useful data...

Keep up your great effort,
Yaro

[conner85]

Yaro, thanks for the suggestion on sharing the notes. I'll try to post that info. Being new to the technology, I really appreciate these tips and suggestions. I'm disappointed in my results so far but I'll keep it running and see what I can learn. A couple questions for anyone to chime in on... I'm using one 36 ah batt as my charge batt which is only charged on the machine. For the run batt I use a 334 cca batt or two 7ah in parallel, alternating between charging one on a conventional charger and using the other to run the machine. Question #1 when the charge batt is full could I use it to run the wheel and radiantly charge the run batts even if I usually charge the run batts conventionally? Question #2 is there something that I should be doing differently to see better charging as currently it is taking about 2.5 run batt cycles to fully charge the charge batt. To me this seems really poor. I'll post a video in the next post if I can upload it. Question #3 for transistor matching does this method work? Connecting volt meter neg prob across base and collector then connecting volt meter positive prob to emitter? I did this on a lot of 50 transistors and got a range of readings from 05-29. Several values had 3-5 matching transistors. I combined 8 transistors that read from 19-21. If this is considered matched I would be close to the intermediate build. Question #4 can I run the wheel at 24 v ( two 12v in series) without frying anything in the circuit. If the primary is 24v does the charge also have to be 24v? I tried staying with the handbook build instructions with the exception of the frame as you will see in the video. And lastly as BobZ has advised me before adding another coil now is moving to fast but I have to resist the urge to add a few more transistors and a pickup could to try to boost the charging. Thanks in advance for your input. I know you guys have gone through all these newbie achievements and frustrations and are keeping me from straying from the correct process.