Massive Tesla Coil Plays Music In The Snow

Massive Tesla Coil

One of our tipsters stumbled across a pretty impressive video of a giant Tesla coil playing music — in a snowy forest! The forum showing off the video is in Finnish but Google Translate does a pretty good job getting the point across.

This massive Tesla coil dubbed the BiggerDR was built by [Kizmo], who lives way up north in Finland. He was originally inspired by another build and decided to try his hand at making one. The Tesla coil, detailed in another forum post (in English this time) has some pretty impressive specs. The coil alone has 1550 wraps! Not too mention a pretty impressive bank of capacitors in series…

His YouTube channel has some great videos of the build — in fact, he’s been messing around with Tesla coils for at least 7 years already — stick around after the break to see BiggerDR in action.

Our first snowy and electrical musical debut is the classic and venerable Imperial March.

And of course, the Benny Hill theme.

[Thanks for the tip, Aleksin!]

15 thoughts on “Massive Tesla Coil Plays Music In The Snow

  1. Oh cool, I was not expecting to find my project from here!

    I think i have not published technical specs of this thing anywhere so here it goes:

    – Secondary coil: 315mm in diameter and is 1700mm tall. It has roughly 1300 turns
    – Toroid: 1250mm major diameter, 325mm minor diameter
    – Primary coil: 4 turns of 10mm copper pipe, water cooled
    – Tank capacitor: 12s3p configuration of GTO thyristor snubber capacitors. Total of 12kV 0.94µF
    – H-bridge of Fuji 1MBI800U4B-120 IGBTs, 2 parallel in each bridge leg.
    – DC bus: 4x 1500µF 700VDC plastic film capacitors as energy storage
    – Driver is Steve Wards UD2.1b with some mods and midi Interrupter is Phillip Slawinskis MIDI Pro Tesla Coil Controller
    – Primary current limiter is set to 4000Amperes. DC bus voltage is 580VDC
    – Highest recorded power consumption was little bit over 20kW of DC power. Power electronics can handle a lot more…
    – Power source: Rectified 3x400VAC 3phase

    The coil stands 3.4 meters tall once assembled and so far longest spark I have measured has been over 5 meters. I would like to see 6 meters in near future. The coil is under constant development to make it look and function even better than it is right now. My youtube channel is best way of keeping up with my work, I have plenty of cool things planned in near future.. :)

    – Tuomas ‘Kizmo’ Koivurova

    1. I have a question that you might be able to answer for me. I’ve seen polyphonic musical tesla coils (well, one anyway, at The Geek Group) but only pretty small ones. All the bigger musical tesla coils I’ve seen have been monophonic. Is the size actually connected to how well it can do polyphony due to frequency or duty cycle limitations or something like that? Or is it just a coincidence (very possible considering how few musical tesla coils I’ve seen). If it is just a coincidence, are you planning on implementing polyphony?

    1. I had to put that side by side with the original C&C Hell March audio on YT and play them both at the same time for best results, but that’s pretty cool and nice work! I checked out some of your other videos such as the induction heating unit, you seem to have a lot of those snubber caps :D I was barely able to find 4 via surplus, any tips for locating them, or do you buy new?

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