This is from the time Rick Harris and his fiance, Robyn, came down to Hvguy Labs and gave us a visit. Rick brought several cool things: namely, his vacuum tube coil and Marx bank. They also brought a 14.4kV potential transformer just for us!! We have many more photographs of the weekend they spent here, unfortunately they are not online yet but a couple of the best ones are shown below.

Rick and Robyn are great people, we're glad they were able to make it all the way from Kansas. We had lots of fun, not only with high voltage stuff but at the beach also -- where Rick and I experienced some MAJOR undercurrents! Robyn was the only sane person there I think, the water was very cold and the waves were over 5 feet...she stayed on dry land...

Rick is relatively new to the HV hobby and has come a long way in a very short time as the pictures reflect. The first picture is his VTTC, based on a single 810 and arcs about 7". I grabbed an old HeNe laser of mine, and let his coil arc to the anode lead. YES! It ran the laser quite well as you can see.

Something which I had not seen in operation before, was a Marx bank. Rick's bank uses big doorknob capacitors (40kV ones) and a flyback driver he made specifically to charge them. It will make a bright, very LOUD spark that is around 4" long. Very impressive.

Thanks again to those two for coming down.......hopefully we'll see them again before long. Maybe we'll have our 12" coil up and running again -- perhaps we could get both Rick and Robyn inside a faraday cage ; )