DIY 50,000 Volt Arc Lighter Powered Tesla Coil (ft. Integza)

Tape is able to protect from corona?? I'M CALLING CHINA! It was great working with you, Jay!

I wish my grandfather were still alive. He was a high voltage transformer engineer for Westinghouse and, when he was very young, he worked for Tesla. I sure would love to pick his brain about these projects while I build them.

My favorite part is when he asked for donations by suggesting they will encourage longer, more frequent uploads. That's so true and honest! Much better than the manipulative ways other channel hosts solicit donations. 10/10 overall rating for this guy and his channel!

This one is very interesting. The arc lighter is itself a tesla coil. Instead of a spark gap it uses a transistor with a DC power input (the rechargeable battery in the lighter) to form a high frequency self oscillating circuit to drive the primary coil of the transformer in the lighter. That results in high voltage high frequency AC on the output of the plasma lighter. This is why the plasma lighter could be used for the power supply for the lightning tower build (Cockroft-Walton voltage multiplier). Now, since the output of the arc lighter is AC, you have to include the high voltage diode in your tesla coil primary circuit as a half wave rectifier because you want to charge the capacitor with a high DC voltage. So essentially the plasma lighter high voltage AC output gets rectified by the high voltage diode and charges your high voltage capacitor every half cycle. Once the capacitor voltage gets high enough to break down the spark gap, a spark jumps the gap and the gap becomes very conductive (almost like the gap was shorted). The stored voltage in the capacitor can now discharge across the spark gap and through the tesla coil primary coil. As that stored energy is suddenly dumped across your tesla coil primary, it results in an even higher voltage on the tesla coil secondary. Voila! A tesla coil powering a tesla coil! Very nice!

Beautiful build! There is just something so satisfying about tiny Tesla coils! Great job!

It looks so clean and smooth, it’s beautiful!

I love how cool your devices look. You show everyone science can be so cool and fun besides being important.

Awesome video! Really looking forward to this build. That was a pretty cool perk for being a patron too - thanks Jay!

I've been with this channel for years Jay and I'm never disappointed. I really ought to make one of these someday as well as that lightning detector circuit, so cool. Thank you for another great video.

Epic, easy to understand and smoothly edited video, as always!

This is a pretty neat project, I love how simple these are to build in fact I built something not much bigger over a year ago but I used a small flyback transformer from a 5" tv set and just a simple mosfet driver to drive the trasnformer. I have also learned that you can use the inverter transformers from old LCD TV's as well which are not hard to come across these days. The arcs are about the same in size but have more thickness to them and don't dare to touch it lol. I am hoping to tweak the tuning a bit more in the future to hopefully get larger arcs. To power it I am using 3 18650's in series to get around 12V and what is really fun about something like this is how the principle of function pretty much stays the same once you have a HV source to work with.

Glad to see you back Jay! Another great video!

Great to see you back. Good little project there. This is one of the good things about the internet. Is channels like this. Always love your work.

I definitely want to build this one day when I have all the parts

Looks, brains, and a people person. Great show.

Need more videos like this 💯 good job man 🙏

"the ultimate arc lighter hack" styropyro: hold my beer

"As a former Tesla trooper, I am very happy with this video!" - Lt. Surge, 7th Electric Pokemon Army.

Great revision to the original bug zapper one! Thoroughly enjoyed building the original so am definitely going to give this one a go!

This is the video I have been praying for. Going to build this ASAP! Thank you so much :)