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The spark gap is three spherical copper RF knife-switch contacts on the end of the 50Hz supply (photo) so two gaps in series, and I put a vacuum cleaner nozzle adjacent to suck out the arc and leave the spark. It's very noisy! I have an old tumble-drier motor and had planned to make a rotary spark-gap, but life (and work) gets in the way sometimes.
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Nice design indeed, ingenious and fascinating-looking! It's astonishing how much current is measured across these spark-gap switches - on some coils, in the 1,000s of A, and indeed, the most spectacular Tesla coils are those that are mechanically excited, although some semiconductor designs with IGBT bricks in a full bridge are catching up.
It would be interesting and challenging in an enjoyable way, I imagine, to make a rotary spark gap with quenching.
I haven't yet made a mechanically-excited Tesla coil, though, and I'm sticking to my valve design for the time being - less noisy for a smaller environment such as where I live, for starters.
The challenges are entirely different, with impedance matching being at the crux, and preventing instantaneously devastating flashovers between the secondary coil and grid windings, or inside the big power oscillator valve.