Hi Shamus,
I look forward to see pictures of your setup
In the mean time I will post mine.

This is a two trifilar coil setup where one strand of one coil is used to trigger the transistors and other five strands are to power the whole thing. Each strand has its own transistor. Those things on my coils are only some lead weights to prevent vibration of the coil. Here's the other side of my circuit:

You can see that the upper middle transistor area has a hole burned in the plate. The hole is between the Neon bulb terminals. I had some problems like this before. If you solder the two neon bulb leads close together, the high voltage BEMF sipke can arc across these leads and provide a short to the battery. Therefore make sure that your neon leads are as far appart as possible. If you look close, you can see, that I scraped away those little copper rings between other neon leads. Actually I burned that transistor when I was powering my SSG with a variac and attached ground wire and diode to the + terminal on the charging battery. You can read about this on the Radiant energy results topic
However, keep up your good work and do not give up. I also had many moments when I thought that maybe this is not meant for me to understand