static "sucker" gap / cap stress

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Original poster: "Christoph Bohr by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <cb-at-luebke-lands.de>

Hello everybody.

After experimanting with RSG's I made a little excursion back to static gaps.

I built a sucker gap with 2 elektrodes and attached an ordinary vacuum 
cleaner to it. ( ordinary design....t-shaped sewer tube and 2 copper tubes )
The results with my current magnifier were disappointing as the quenching 
seems not to be too good.
But with the ordinary 5" setup I got really hot white steamers to the 
ceiling space-limited by the walls to 4 feet.
The power in the arcs must have been really big, they almost looked like a 
time-exposure.....only real ;-)
This mus be due to the high current the MOT-Supply can deliver.
The break rate seemed very high, estimated between 400 and 800 bps.
Only problem that occoured: THe tank cap got warm, nit really hot but 
palpable after some 20 second runs at roughly 5KVA ( no PFC ).
I use a Maxwell 37667 Type cap, 30nF and 35KV. Is this cap to weak for this 
arrangment or do I do something wrong that puts stress an the cap.
Tuning was done at 1KVA before I turned to higher power levels....but the 
effect of streamer-loading shouldn't affect the tuning too much.

My personal results:

Pros: The sucker gap really performs well and is extremely cheap and easy 
to build and seems to be very robust, a good choice and a really good 
performer in my                system at least.

Cons: the noise really requiers hearing protection, I loosend one of my 
earmuffs for a moment an was really shocked.....luckily noone was at home 
at this time.
           Bad performance with my magnifiers although I read about people 
using them succesfully with maggies. I will go for high bps RSG with that I 
think, perhaps with
           sucker gap in series to aid quenching.

Questions to be solved: Cap heating.....is it bad or not......dont want to 
destroy it as its my only professional pulse cap.

I hope I don't mess up the list with such "low-level posts" but I like to 
share results as sometimes it might be usefull for other users,too ...

happy coiling


Christoph