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Hurray, I destroyed my homemade cap!
From: Adam[SMTP:absmith-at-tiac-dot-net]
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 1997 6:46 PM
To: tesla list
Subject: Hurray, I destroyed my homemade cap!
I have enjoyed building my 8" tesla coil, with the exception of my
homemade oil filled aluminum and LDPE capacitor. The mineral oil was
really the problem. First, I used a rubbermaid box- leaked. Then, I
built a plexiglas box cemented firmly with Methylene Chloride- leaked.
This transformer oil (UInivolt N61) is messy too- it stained my brick
patio and my wood floors, and it smells kind of like a Jiffy Lube (no
offense to Jiffylube workers intended).
So today, I destroyed the capacitor all together, plunging plates and
poly into trashcans full of soapy water. My next experiment is going to
be a reconstruction of this device, but without the oil. I built a few
dry capacitors today with my scrap poly and aluminum, and they run fine
dry at up to 15kV, with very little warming for at least 30 minutes of
intermittent tesla use (2 minutes at a time, 120mil of LDPE dielectric).
The only difference was a slightly more noticable ozone production. In
their favor, they're clean, lighter and easy to repair/rearrange, etc...
so skip the oil, I'm runnin' dry! :-)
-Adam
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Adam Smith
absmith-at-tiac-dot-net
Epoch, Inc. Digital Music Project
www.tiac-dot-net/users/absmith/ MP3 Demo Tracks Now Available!
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