The Coil in a "Magnifier" Vs. Conventional configuration:

I started this coil built as a conventional configuration and after some learning and playing around I got it to work reasonably well. I didn't play with coupling and such due to time constraints but my biggest goof was that I didn't play with the spark gap setting (distance) until much later. The spark gap distance controls the max voltage that the capacitor will charge to and consequently the largest potential spark out of the coil. I started taking pictures of the coil after I put it in the magnifier configurations so have many pictures of it that way and only lately started taking pictures of it in the conventional configuration.