Faux Tesla Coil-Part 17- Signs and Base

The family gathering for the holidays has passed.  It is time to get back to work on my project.  It is so close to being completed.  I have to paint the transformer, then I will be assembling the project.  It has taken much longer than I thought it would.  It has been a busy year and I have not had as much free time as in some other years.

 I have done some work on the Tesla Coil part of the project.  I have added some signage, which greatly improved the look of the piece.  The signs were painted on canvas textured art paper and mounted on the metal stand with wire.  The lettering is from a font on the computer which I printed and transferred to the paper once it had been painted with orange paint.  After the lettering was on, I gave it a wash of burnt umber and glaze mix to make the sign look as if it had been around for a while.  The October 31st date was picked because it was a Halloween piece of course.  Also, according to folk tales, spirits could appear once it was dark on Halloween, but had to disappear before dawn the next day.  So naturally, his show would be at the time the time that the pumpkin man could appear.  I also added "last show" because vaudeville shows were disappearing during the time period and I wanted to add that historical note to the piece.


The lower sign is braced with a piece of the legs I cut off from the tower braces.  Readers may remember that I cut down the height of the towers because they overpowered the Tesla coil spheres.  The platform that the lower sign rests on is made of balsa wood.  I scribed the wood slats into it with a number two pencil, then coated the wood with varnish before gluing it to the base of the metal platform. 



The base of the platform is covered with mathematical formulas used in making a Tesla Coil.  They include formulas for figuring out the transformer input and output, capacitive reactance, resonant circuit formula, spiral coil inductance, helical coil inductance, inverse conical coil inductance, and Ohms Law for AC current.  I found the formulas on the internet while I was reading up on how to make a Tesla Coils.  Although this one is just an artistic representation of a Tesla Coil, I read about how to create them in order to give my art work some grounding in reality.  (Pardon the pun.)  I decided to use the formulas because I wanted the ground to have some type of treatment.



When I thought about how I wanted to treat the ground on the diorama, I searched my memory for times I had been to circuses and carnivals.  One of my earliest memories of a circus was seeing an elephant.  The elephant was standing on some hay that had been scattered on the gray, hard- packed ground.  I don't know why the hay made such an impression, but it did.  A later memory of a carnival came to me of tufts of grass poking up here and there and uneven ground. I knew I wanted something on the ground, but previous experience has taught me that vegetative matter can make a terrible mess on a diorama. (Or more specifically, everywhere in the house when the diorama is moved.)  So I turned my thoughts in other directions, and that is when I remembered the formulas.  I thought about what Tesla might have thought about while figuring out how to make the first one.  I imagined him suddenly being struck with an idea, grabbing a pencil and scribbling what came to mind on the first place he saw, so that the thought would not slip away from him.  This is of course only my imagination.  (It is more likely that he was highly disciplined and everything was extraordinarily neat and precise, but this is my imagination, so I can do what I want.)  That is how the formulas came to be written on the base of the diorama.  It adds interest to the piece, takes up some of the bare spots, and looks as if someone were pondering electricity and physics.

My next post will show the completed diorama.  I have to glue the pieces into place and add some wires to represent cables that run from the generator to the Tesla Coil.  I'm looking forward to finishing the project.  I have two projects waiting for me once it is complete.  I can't wait to get started on them.