spark gap spacing

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Original poster: "Jeremiah by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <jmeizis-at-kc.rr-dot-com>

Hi,
I was wanting to know how far you should set your gap?  Today i was doing some
testing and i set my gap real close together and it was a very poor
performance.  I noticed the more i opened up the gap the better the
performance.  When i opened it up all the way, and i was turning up the variac
it finally started arcing at 11.5 KV then one of the capacitors on my MMC blew
up.  It didn't actually explode but part of the insulation popped off, it was
kind of weird.  Why did that happen in the first place?  The caps i'm using are
10 .068uF 1.25 KV and the gap is an inch wide at full open.
Thanks
Jeremiah