I was little disappointed to find out that the electronics shop had no appropriate capacitors lying around.  I had been hoping I could avoid assembling by hand, or buying the fiddly little bastards.  Oh well, I can only hope this doesn’t set me back too far.  It looks like the plate capacitors are actually pretty good, but it looks like it will be a bit messy, playing around with insulating oil.

This page has blog about a guy’s project building one of these:

http://qsl.net/f3wm/tesla/my_first.html#top

His Tesla coil is by far the prettiest one I’ve seen.  My goals for this weekend with respect to this project are:

• Cobble together the stand for this thing.
• Build either the spark gap, top load or both.
• Track down a source for polyethylene and transformer oil.