Liquid Layered Capacitors

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Original poster: "Breneman, Chris" <brenemanc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hello,

I'm new to building tesla coils, and am trying to get my first one 
built.  The problem is that I have very little money available to 
spend on materials.  The main thing I'm trying to get now is a 
capacitor for the primary circuit, and it looks like my best option 
is to build one.  I've seen a number of designs for homemade 
capacitors, but came up with one myself, and was wondering if anyone 
has tried it, or if there is any inherent problem in the design.
I was thinking that the most efficient and easy-to-build designs were 
liquid capacitors where at least one of the plates is a liquid such 
as salt water.  The most common design of a liquid capacitor seems to 
be filling bottles with the solution and putting them all in a vat 
with another conductive solution.  But isn't this wasting space due 
to the large plates?  The best space-savers seem to be layered 
capacitors, which also seem to be pretty efficient (from what I've 
read), but the recurring problem is apparently that the solids don't 
get extremely close contact with each other.  So I got thinking ... 
what if a layered liquid capacitor could be built?  Or more like 
liquids that could dry.
Here's one specific design idea that I had: Inside of some kind of 
bottle, put a small amount of salt water, then a layer of olive oil 
as a dielectric.  Olive oil will float on top of the water and 
generally has a higher freezing point than water 
(http://www.oliveoilsource.com/olive_chemistry_freezing.htm) so it 
should be possible to freeze this or at least make it harden somewhat 
without causing the water to freeze and expand - this could 
potentially be done in a refrigerator.  After the layer of oil 
hardened, a small layer of hot glue could be placed on top of it to 
prevent it from mixing with above layers.  Then more salt water could 
be added, and the process repeated, until there were enough layers to 
fill the bottle.
One problem with this is that I can't find the breakdown voltage of 
olive oil.  Does anyone happen to know this?  Also, is there any 
mechanical or other problem with this design that would prevent it 
from working?

Thanks,
Crispy