Re: Halloween night, CP cap {con,de}struction

• To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
• Subject: Re: Halloween night, CP cap {con,de}struction
• From: Bert Hickman <bert.hickman-at-aquila-dot-com> (by way of Terry Fritz <terryf-at-verinet-dot-com>)
• Date: Sun, 01 Nov 1998 20:47:48 -0700
• Approved: terryf-at-verinet-dot-com

Tesla List wrote:
> 
> Original Poster: Chip Atkinson <chip-at-pupman-dot-com>
> 
<SNIP>
> 
> My Condenser Products 0.025uF/20,000V tesla coil cap blew up!  I'm glad it
> was on the roof because it could have really hurt someone.
> 
> Luckily, I had another CP cap and decided to try it too, since the coil
> was going well and perhaps it was a fluke that it blew up.  Nope!  The
> second one blew, and even more violently than before.
> 
<SNIP>

Chip,

Sorry to hear about the death of your two caps! As you know, Condenser
Products had apparently issued a recall for the batch of caps built as
part of the last Tesla Builders group buy, apparently because of a
manufacturing (or design?) defect. Do you happen to know which vintage
yours were? CP applied some type of derating scheme to their caps, and
claimed that the 20 KVDC ones should be good for use with a 14.4 kV pig
source. However, if these were _actually_ 20 KVDC caps, this was
probably not sufficient for the stress they'd actually see! I agree with
John that they should actually rated for considerably higher voltage -
more like 50 kV or above.

Good luck on the home-builts!

-- Bert --

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