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Re: [TCML] party cup capacitors



On 2010-11-02 at 08:25, Brandon Garretson ( garretsontech@xxxxxxxxx ) said:
This idea has been around for a decade and this is the first Im hearing of it?

http://www.angelfire.com/ak5/energy21/cupcap.htm

I must have gone through about 90% of the archives on this forum over
the past two years and I have never had the urge to try to build a
homemade cap until now.

Has anyone proven that these arent worth the effort?

They aren't worth the effort. Been there, done that, spilled lots of oil ;)

I think for a party cup capacitor housed in a 4"x12" piece of PVC pipe, filled with vegetable oil, with about 20 'plates', it weighed maybe 10lbs, gave maybe 1-2nf of capacitance, and could barely hold up to a 12kV NST.

Until you build enough of these to put in series-parallel to get the desired voltage and capacitance, you'll have some massive oily mess.

And the second one of the caps punctures, you get to tear the whole thing apart.

When I made mine, I used aluminum foil tape, and the cheapest red party cups I could find. I suppose if you were using low enough voltages, this type of cap might be acceptable if you're really on a budget. Might even get away without the oil, though the corona will eventually break down the plastic. Might also experiment with plastic party plates as well and make a 'plate cap', though the one I made lasted all of 5 seconds...

Just for documentation purposes, here's a picture of the first cup cap I made, using a clear plastic container. Lasted one night of experimenting with a 12kV 30mA NST, http://kb3ewy.com:8000/old/images/cupcap.jpg

Save yourself the time and money and buy some MMC type capacitors. I think they're still about $3 a cap these days...

--andy
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