Nothing to be embarrassed about, we all work with what we have and try to make the best of it.
is the larger number of turn on the secondary necessary when trying to get HV? I was told in tesla coils the primary "whips" the voltage up the secondary and that is how the voltage builds up.
Yes, the action of a good 1/4 wave air-core resonator is somewhat like a "whip" in that the top end is free to swing to very high voltage amplitude.
The number of turns on the secondary is related to the frequency of the resonance. You must consider the "electrical length" of the winding, which
influences its inductance, which in turn combined with the top capacity will determine the basic resonant frequency of the setup. Shorter electrical
length means smaller inductance which means higher frequency of resonance. Once you get over about 4 MHz you are well into high frequency radio
transmissions and you will have to have your layout, components and construction all fit for that purpose. For practical experimentation using
ordinary transistors and haphazard layout, you should try to stay below 1 MHz. This means longer coils, more turns, etc.
You can attain VRSWR and high voltages with shorter, higher frequency coils but as I said, you have to be much more careful with your layout and
component choices. You aren't going to get much satisfaction with a 2n2222 transistor and a 4MHz resonator!
If the secondary is a looped coil what would introducing a large cap do to the situation? Freq, voltages?
I'm not sure what you mean by "looped coil" or "large cap" here. You can use any number of on-line calculators to determine resonant frequency,
inductor and capacitor values. My favourite one is here:
http://www.1728.org/resfreq.htm
If the secondary is feeding back to the system can I get away with smaller number of turns?
I'm not sure what you mean by "feeding back" here. The Slayer exciter circuit uses feedback from the base (bottom) of the secondary to drive
the transistor's Base terminal. The TinselKoil X uses antenna feedback from the secondary's E-field to drive the mosfet driver chip. As I said
before the turn count of the secondary, all other things being equal, will determine the basic resonant frequency of the system. The fewer turns,
the lower the inductance and the higher the resonant frequency, again if all other variables are held constant.
Did one 400 turn coil and using that as my secondary. Took me hours with thin cable 
Primary is going to be 3 turns
Good. It's good practice to wind coils, good discipline, and you'll get better at it the more you do. Masking tape is your friend, use it to
tape down the turns so if you need to stop or if you let go for some reason, your coil will only unwind to the taped part, not totally!
But I have to warn you: You will find it very difficult to get consistent and satisfactory results using a loose, sloppy layout with lots of
clipleads, and the problems will get worse with higher frequencies.
One other thing: When posting pictures to the forum, please PLEASE try to keep the horizontal width small enough so the pix don't run
off the page to the right. 800 pixels wide is good enough for most purposes; rarely you may need to use up to 1024 pixels wide. If you
need to show some detail at high magnification, crop it out of the larger picture and post the cropped detail at no more than 1024 pixels wide.
