simple vic for learning purposes

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Dave,
I've watched and seen VICs being built and tried a few myself.  Here's what I'm playing with to try and skin this cat another way.  I take a variac or 24 volt or 12 volt trannny from the wall plug and into two 110/220 volt step ups in series and then to my 8XA donut.  I tried straight off the wall plug at 110 but could not get amps below 1.  With this corny step down/step up circuit I'm sending 100 volts into the system and amps just budges off zero.  I've ordered a 0-1 amp gauge to see what I'm doing clearer.  I'll say more when it comes.
I have a question.  What size is the variable resistor that is to be connected to ground from the negative side of the circuit? 
Thanks for letting me bump in.
kb

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Dave,
I've watched and seen VICs being built and tried a few myself.  Here's what I'm playing with to try and skin this cat another way.  I take a variac or 24 volt or 12 volt trannny from the wall plug and into two 110/220 volt step ups in series and then to my 8XA donut.  I tried straight off the wall plug at 110 but could not get amps below 1.  With this corny step down/step up circuit I'm sending 100 volts into the system and amps just budges off zero.  I've ordered a 0-1 amp gauge to see what I'm doing clearer.  I'll say more when it comes.
I have a question.  What size is the variable resistor that is to be connected to ground from the negative side of the circuit? 
Thanks for letting me bump in.
kb

 
hey kickback, thats sound like an interesting circuit i'll be watching for your updates.
that amp gauge sounds like a great idea, a few ma makes a huge difference, or atleast in my setup.
as for the variable resister, I have know idea. I was playing with a bunch of different resisters today but I dont have any varible ones. I can tell you its going to be different for every setup, i seems like the more voltage you want the bigger the resistance needs to be. I'm not sure what i was using i have to look, but it was the biggest one i had, i tried grounding it in a few different places; i tryed derectly on the negative tube, and before and after the negative inductor. Conecting it before the neg choke worked best if I hooked the circuit up like 8XA circuit, but voltage was still about half as much as not having the ground. As for connecting it to the negative tube I used a huge resister but I can only get around 300volts like that. I need to shop for a huge rariable one. Without the resister it grounds out the circuit and no voltage can be produced. The circuit also grounds out if I ground the water.
 

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so i took some notes today and here they are,
 
the circuit resonates at 11.55kz, the transformer primary is 6.5mh, the transformer secondary is 19.4H, the negative inductor is around 22h, the positive inductor is 56.6mh.
 As i messed around with it and increased inductance I realized that I could restrict amps and raise voltage by increasing the negative inductance, the coolest thing about this is that the resonant frequency didn't change much which is pretty strong evidence that the water capacitor resonates with the positive inductor.(just like dynodon said)
 
from my findings i calculated my cell to have a capacitance of 3.35nf but when I calculate it using simple capacitance equations i get 1.8nf. I guess theyre could be a lot of reasons for this difference.
At the cell i measure around 1000 volts and .02 amps

 

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correction to my last post the current was .02 amps not ma haha sorry
 Spring break is over so I'm headed back to school tomorrow. I have the next few weeks to plan my next move. I think I might build a better Vic next and maybe a better pwm, idk we'll see.

more to come this summer!

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did some tests today, nothing to interesting but I did notice something that seems wrong. The coils/water cap I'm using resonate at around 18 kHz(input)  but at the cell I measure around 6khz? Stan talks about pulse doubling but mine is a third of what I start with. anyone run into this? Or have any suggestions?