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A Novel Capacitor
From: Malcolm Watts[SMTP:MALCOLM-at-directorate.wnp.ac.nz]
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 1997 10:25 PM
To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
Subject: A Novel Capacitor
All,
Here is something approaching an extended foil design that might
be a help to anyone wanting a quick and dirty but cheap and easy to
make capacitor. I have no idea what the voltage rating of it is (save
that the one I constructed can take 15kVDC fulltime). This will
probably cause Telecom shares to skyrocket.
Get a length of multi-pair telephone cable. The piece I used is
18" long and contains 10 pairs (20 wires). Strip back an inch of the
outer sheath from each end. At one end, take every second wire and
simply bend it back over the sheath. You should end up with ten wires
bent over and overlapping the sheath. Now strip 1/4" or so from the
remaining 10 wires (stil standing upright) and solder them together.
At the other end, do the same but this time, you want to bend
back the ten wires showing continuity to the solder joint at the
first end. Finally solder, the remaining ten wires together a la
end 1. You can run a bead of hot melt over the ends of the bent-back
wires to insulate them and prevent corona.
The capacitor I made has a capacitance of 200pF. You can
obviously connect a number of these in parallel to make large
capacitances. To maximise this value, try and select wires to be
joined at an end so that they are intermingled with the wires to be
bent back.
I have no idea how this will go in Tesla service. The insulation
is all PVC. However, mine delivers a healthy snapping discharge. As
soon as I get my hands on more cable, I will make one large enough
for use on a coil and give it a test run.
:)
Malcolm