Building great Lifters is a skill that's based primarily on experience -- not just on technical knowledge. While there are some fundamental principles involved, what is most important to keep in mind is that your skills will improve with general construction and testing experience.

Many beginners immediately attempt to improve on the Lifter design, however, changing the design before you're familiar with it may ultimately lead to disappointment & frustration. Therefore, it is recommended that you follow the typical lifter design until you have at least one work lifter before making modifications.

Here are some notes on things to keep in mind to make your lifter operate more reliably:

1. Build a lot of lifters until you get a good feel for the forces involved and how changes in the design will affect that. I've built over 200 of them so far, and I've learned more from the 7 that failed than I ever did from the ones that worked. Don't give up!

2. Some Lifters will work better than others no matter what. I have no idea why. My favorite lifter has actually been stepped on and re-glued and it still works the best.

3. Scrape the underside of your corona wire well -- you must do this if it is enamel coated wire. Remove the enamel because otherwise the capacitance gets too high and it will arc out instead of smoothly transferring the leakage current.

4. Use small wire. I used to use 30-gauge enamel-coated magnet wire for the corona wire and both of the power-leads. Having the enamel coating on the power-leads reduces bleed-off of current before it reaches the lifter. Now, I've switched to 50-gauge stainless steel wire from Information Unlimited, but I will still use the copper for my power-leads. Click here

5. Use small, lightweight balsa wood. I buy 2mm by 6mm strips and cut them in half to 2mm by 3mm before I glue them. I taper the ends with the exacto-knife and use superglue to hold it together (not the gel superglue-- the regular liquid works better).

6. Fold your foil completely over the top of the wire. I cut mine an extra 1 cm tall and fold the entire extra 1 cm flap over the top of the horizontal strut and tape it on the other side (I cut a piece of scotch tape in half lengthwise and try to go all the way down the flap from one end to the other with it).

7. Make sure that you don't have sharp edges on your corners. Keep in mind that the majority of your leakage in a well-built lifter is from the sharp edges at the corners. you can actually use a tiny piece of tape (or a drip of superglue) to cover the top part of the corner-edges and reduce this leakage further.

8. Don't unplug your picture tube if you are using a computer monitor. I have no idea if this actually works, but I think that the added bit of capacitance may help a tiny bit for minor power-sluctuations. I run my tap out from under the suction-cup. Be very careful with monitors! They can produce dangerous shocks!

9. Make sure you have good connections to your ground leads and hv-supply leads. If you don't it will still work, but you will have extra resistance and less current. Also, when you're testing the Lifter, make sure that the both of your power-supply wires drape-free...otherwise they can lose-power or completely short out by touching the ground. The wires should be sagging in the air between your power supply and the Lifter for maximum results.

10. Don't use any resistors in series with your lifter. You need all the current that you can get. My monitor has an internal current limiter, and I hear that most others do to.

11. Adjust your tethers correctly. This takes a lot of practice, and I personally have to relearn it for each new size of lifter that I make. A lifter with angled tethers is a bit more stable, but only if the tethers are exactly the same length.

12. Make your tethers exactly the same length. I intentionally tape mine down too short and then pull them out through the tape until they are all the same length. If they aren't identical lengths, your lifter will have more than one maximum energy-state and will "wiggle" back and forth between states. If they are done correctly, it will be rock-solid stable when it levitates. You can tell if your lifter is wiggling because it will move back and forth between a couple of positions erratically. (for instance, it might jump between 10 o'clock and 5 o'clock -- this is probably if one tether is too short).

13. A little trick that I learned with the tethers is that if you run your power-supply wires in from the back of the lifter, make your front tether a little bit shorter to compensate for the extra pull from the wires in the back. This will help to stabilize your lifter -- the way that I do it makes it lean a little bit towards the onlooker, which means that is leaning a little bit away from the power-supply wires.

14. Ground your test surface. I always do this now -- it completely eliminates mirror charges on the surface. This isn't a problem for larger lifters that have legs, but mine don't. In my earlier videos you can see me blowing on the lifter to get it to take off -- but in the later videos you don't. The difference is grounding your test surface. Here's how to do it: tape aluminum-foil to the entire top of your test-surface and the connect a wire from it to the common-ground on your power-supply (this is the common ground that the lifter should be connected to). You will immediately notice an improvement in takeoffs. Actual lifter flight should be unaffected, however.

15. Keep your power-leads as short as possible. Keep your power-leads suspended so that they angle down to the lifter when it is resting. The power-leads should be suspended horizontally while it is in flight -- which means that you should suspend them higher than the lifter's resting position on your back-support. Keeping them short doesn't have to be ridiculously short -- mine are between 2 and 3 feet long each (remember, mine are 30-gauge magnet wire, which has a small but measurable resistance). Make sure to get the enamel off the ends of your power-supply wire to ensure good contact on the monitor.

16. Lifters work better the longer you use them. I don't know why. I have a couple of good guesses -- one is that the corona-wire gets "broken in" after about 15 minutes of use. Another is that the foil tends to oxidize on top which increases its dielectric constant. (you may notice tiny white spots on the top of your foil -- those are aluminum oxide deposits).

17. Put a decent tension on your corona-wire. There is obviously a limit to the tension that you can apply, because toothpick-thin balsa-wood vertical struts will break very easily. Your wire needs to be straight, though.

18. Use a good height to width ratio for the foil on your skirt. I use a shorter ratio than Naudin does -- mine work best at 15cm long and 3cm tall. I believe that he uses 20cm by 2.5 cm.

19. Reinforce your larger lifters with hot-glue. For a normal lifter, super-glue should suffice. If not, use tiny dabs of hot-glue for support on the inside of your corners. You should not be able to see the hot-glue when it dries -- if so you've probably used too much. Hot-glue has weight too.

20. Build multi-cellular lifters as two separate lifters and then glue them together. For instance, if I make a Lifter 12" on each side and make another at 6" on a side, I can glue on at an angle inside of the other and end up with 4 lifting cells (a multi-cellular lifter). This makes construction much easier -- 4 cells for the price of 2.