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Re: More on small caps (with a bang)
> Original Poster: "Barton B. Anderson" <mopar-at-uswest-dot-net>
> When you say "nothing great happens", do you mean your getting "no" spark
> off the
> secondary terminal? If your not getting any spark, make sure your tuning
Yes, exactly that.
> pointed object off the top terminal to direct the discharge path to a
grounded
> rod of some type. Bring the grounded rod close enough that breakout occurs.
That helped, or was it new caps. Anyway, I found more X2 caps and found out
the hard way, that opposed to what my intuition said, the smaller caps in a
series chain get the larger voltage over them, and thus blow easier (they
did).
Q = CU --> U = Q / C, in series Q is the same for each cap; thus, the smaller
the C, the larger the U.
But, when I removed those bad apples from the chain, I got my first spark!
It was from a sharp point (a small steel screwdriver on top of the coil) to
a grounded wire. I got it out to at least 10 cm, but got bored, so I removed
the screwdriver and started playing with air discharge. 6-8 cm streamers,
and a 14 cm hit to the ground; this with a 4 mm single spark gap. But it seems
that some of the caps are bad quality, and things started decaying again.
Oh well, I'm happy even with such small sparks, because they're my first :-)