GE 42L series caps Good or Bad??

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

Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>

Hi All,

Apparently GE 42L series are mataized caps instead of solid metal foil
types.  Steve has some of these that burnt out at the end plates:

GE  42L2332
0.33 uF 5%
1200 VDC
500 VAC

He took a look and some larger ones and they seemed to be metalized too!

Should this series of caps be teken off the good caps list?  I always
thought they were foil :-(  Steve ran his really hard with just one string
(  MMCcalc say they should have worked fine...

MMC Calculator  Ver. 2.2   9/12/2000  Terry Fritz
Transformer voltage =  12000 
Transformer current =  .06 
Firing voltage =  16970.52 
Fo =  150000 
Break rate =  200 
Thermal dissipation constant =  33 
Individual cap value =  3.3E-07 
 
Strings  Caps/Str  Capacitance  Voltage   Temp C    Cost              I Arms
  1       20         16.50        24000     1.72   20.00  :-))  :-))  3.44 
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Cheers,

	Terry

>I just finished up a medium coil powered by a 12/60 and a static gap.  My 
>MMC is 20 in series of 1200v .33uf caps for .0165uf -at- 24kv.  Well the coils 
>performance was poor to say the least with only 2 foot arcs.  So i tried and 
>tried with no luck.  So just out of curiosity, i felt the caps after i 
>turned it off.  They were hot!  well 2 of them were.  I let them cool off, 
>then ran it again.  Checked for heating, it was still in those 2 caps.  One 
>was hotter than the other.  So i took them out.  I took apart the really 
>warm one and found some depressing realizations.  The ends of the foil were 
>totally burnt to a crisp at one end!