After a few months of searching for various parts(caps, variacs, Terry filter parts), my coil has reached completion.  The look of it has changed slightly, but all in all it's not too shabby.

The top load has shrunk somewhat, but I'm able to get nice 8 to 10 inch arcs from it.  I'll have pictures of that soon.  Also, due to ignorance on the subect at hand, I pulled my primary coil and re-coiled it in the opposite direction...don't ask why.  In doing that, my nicely coiled primary has been unfortunately replaced with a not-so-nicely coiled primary.  I'll touch that up later.

I have to give a huge THANK YOU to Teslamap and its creator, Kevin.  Over the course of a month or two, Kevin gave me all kinds of great advice on completing and troubleshooting my coil.  Thanks to him, my students got to see the finished product before summer vacation.

If you ever feel like building a coil for yourself, visit teslamap.com.

Below are a few picks of the progress I made and the finished product.

MMC bank

I'll get the specs here later.

9000 volt NST for power

Terry filter

Spark gap...I know, I know...it's not the prettiest thing to look at

The completed coil

 

Actually, after a couple of days of troubleshooting, I lowered my top load...after that, I began to see much longer arcs.

Keep in mind, this is my first coil. Hopefully, coil number two will be much easier on the eyes.

This is a neat picture that I somehow got using my really bad digital camera.  More picures will come soon...and once I figure out how...;-)