Re: Capacitors

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Christopher Boden by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <chrisboden-at-hotmail-dot-com>

The absolute BEST are Geek Group MMCs (www.thegeekgroup-dot-org), with over 3000 
caps in service, there has never been a failure, period.

The worst are anything with Mylar, and the Glassmikes. The barium ones drift 
out of tune. Big nice Pulse caps cost a fortune and have a propensity for 
becoming doorstops. Mica's work well but don't tolerate overvoltage either 
and become HARD doorstops.

A Tesla Coil is about the worst possible environment for a capacitor. You're 
beating the heck out of it with full-swing reversals hundreds of times a 
second (or hundreds of thousands of times a second), tens of thousands of 
volts at hundreds of amps with tons of noise and frequent overvoltage.

Then you get resonant rise and things REALLY get ugly :)

The absolute best solution to this is the MMC cap array. It's the most 
reliable type of Tesla Coil cap with hundreds in use around the world. The 
best choice for an MMC cap is Geek Group Caps with 10MOhm resistors across 
EVERY SINGLE CAP for safety.

When properly built (not at all hard to do), they will last years, they 
maintain a stable value, they're lightweight, portable (one of the few caps 
big enough for Pig coils that you can lift with one hand), safe (they don't 
tend to explode and shoot oil and shrapnel throughout the room), and they 
will tolerate overvoltage to over TWICE their rated value without breakdown, 
and even driven to breakdown you can torture them hundreds of thousands of 
times and they will still hold to within 10% of their ratings! You can 
literally shred the insides to the point of looking like swiss-cheeze and 
they still function perfectly.

Nothing even compares.

To make it even better, The Geek Group works direct with the manufacturer to 
make the caps availible to the Tesla Coiling community at a price 
signifigantly below the list (and even the sale prices at other vendors). 
The Geek Group has been working for quite a while to make this (and tons of 
other things) possible for the betterment of teh coiling community. It's 
what we're here for, because we're coilers too :)

If you'd like to see the caps in action, either stop by the Geek Group 
winter Teslathon in Kalamazoo Michigan on March-23, or ask around, odds are 
there's a coiler not too far from you running one of our caps :) We've 
shipped them all over the world (hear that you UK guys!).

If you have any questions, I'm always onlist and emails sent to 
cboden-at-thegeekgroup-dot-org can expect a responce within hours, often within 
minutes :)



Christopher "Duck" Boden Geek#1
President / C.E.O. / Alpha Geek
The Geek Group
www.thegeekgroup-dot-org
Because the Geek shall inherit the Earth!

>Original poster: "centauri by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" 
><centauri010-at-attbi-dot-com>
>
>hey, what sort of capacitors are generally suitable for coiling and what 
>are
>the types to watch out for? Thanks.
>
>
>