I fired up my (first) TC for the first time today, after months of putting
everything together. Needless to say, it didn't work! I was slowly turning
up the variac, the spark gap fired up, and then I saw some smoke coming
from the cap bank. So I powered down and investigated - turns out one of
the soldered joints had smoked. I kinda regret buying the caps I did, the
legs on them are tiny and this makes it difficult to string them together.
The caps are mounted on some Vector prototyping board, and because the legs
are so small I've had to solder a very small length of high voltage wire
between each cap. I'm looking for some advice really on my cap bank - is
soldering prone to burning out like this? What's the best way to make the
connection? Should I try to solder the legs directly together instead of
using an adjoining length of wire? Should I invest in different caps?
The caps are rated at 0.047uF at 2kV:
http://uk.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Kemet/PHE450SD5470JR06L2/?qs=s4t14sB06yQTV0lacTv0rw==
In 6 strings of 10 their total capacitance should be in the region of
28.2nF.
Here are a couple of pictures of it, you can see the burnt out joint on the
right:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/841/20130504212930.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/713/20130504212952.jpg/