Re: Blown Capacitor!!

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Chip Atkinson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <chip-at-pupman-dot-com>

Hi guys,

I can't remember how much it has exactly.  I think it has 10 rows of 40
caps each, though I'm not positive.  It is between 280 and 400 caps
though.  I'll check tomorrow night, as I can't get to it tonight.  

While Terry did the bulk of the design, I'll say that Terry and I designed
it to be very robust and run at very high break rates.  I think that is
partially what killed the commercial caps that I had.  They did blow up
with a very loud boom.

The MMC cap that replaced them was actually cheaper and better.  Halloween
1999 was very decent TC wise and the MMC withstood one or two direct hits
to the primary.  A couple times I thought I saw flames coming from the
rotary gap/Cap box, shut the thing down and inspected.  No problems and I
fired it back up.  The MMC cap is really great and I do plan on making
another one or two eventually so that I can test the coil with greater
capacitance to see if the sparks are longer and hotter.

Chip

On Tue, 12 Dec 2000, Terry Fritz wrote:

> Hi Ed,
> 
> At 04:01 PM 12/12/2000 -0500, you wrote:
> snip...
> >Roderick,
> >
> >I know how you feel.  I originally built two rolled poly caps and destroyed 
> >both of them, along with a C.P. commercial cap.  It is a sad day.  Has
anyone 
> >built a MMC cap for one of the larger coils running 5 to 15 kva?  Something 
> >in the order of .05 ufd to .10 ufd?  This might approach the cost of a 
> >commercial cap.  I now have in place a safety gap across the rotary to
limit 
> >how much voltage the caps ever see.
> >
> >Ed Sonderman
> 
> 
> "My" original inspiration of getting into MMC work was Chip's infamous
> "Halloween coil" explosions of 98 in which he fried two commercial caps
> while running his big coil on the roof of his house (I wonder if there are
> any pics of that??).  The giant bang noises and oil running down the
> shingles is well documented in the archives of the time.  I remember
> looking at the blown guts of the thing and thingking to myself "there 
are
> better ways to make a cap"...  He has since made a big MMC out of Panasonic
> caps and his coil has been running great ever since.  If Chip has his ears
> on, maybe he could tell the number of rows and strings.  I think it has
> like 350 caps in it but after blowing the $$$ commercial caps, that was a
> bargain...
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 	Terry
> 
>