The two white elbows at the bottom fit onto a tee-piece that is connected to the suction pipe of a vacuum cleaner. This serves to suck away the hot ionized air and also keep the electrodes cool. The rods this time are solid copper bar and much longer for better heat dissipation even when using it on my Homemade Transformer.

I decided to have just two plain copper electrodes. I wanted to increase their surface area as well so I milled three radial slots into each one and fitted copper bar into the slots. These act both as cooling fins to aid quenching and also locate the electrode centrally within its tube. The three bars are a tight fit in their 3/16 inch deep milled slots, but because I wanted to turn the whole electrode in the lathe, I soft soldered them as well (Too much thermal mass for gas torch to Silver Solder).

This is very unlikely to melt, but if it did it is of no consequence as the bars will not move once in their tube. Once they were turned on the lathe to the correct outside diameter, the complete assembly slid comfortably into the surrounding tube as shown below.









This represents serious 'over engineering' - they will never get hot on just an NST. They are 0.75 inch diameter solid copper, 7 inches long. Each electrode (without its surrounding tube) weighs just over 2 pounds.














A vented cover fits over the front hole and is secured with two wing nuts.

This makes a considerable difference to the noise level of the Tesla coil. I prefer to hear the noise of the streamers without the 'crack' of the spark gap. Originally on 1 kw the electrodes were only ever warm after a five minute run. This enabled me to get second notch quenching, as can be seen on the Tuning page.

Since building my Homemade Transformer I have had this gap running on 3Kva+ without any real problems. It gets hot to touch, but not enough to burn. How much the Tesla would benefit from a SRSG I am unsure, but the performance of the static gap so far has surprised me.