Joe Mastroianni wrote:
Hi All, Another question, if I may. So far I've been using MMCs built in strings of 18 made of the illustrious 942C CDE caps. Each one is fitted with it's personal 10M bleeder resistor.I've been recently toying with the idea of picking up a pulse cap or two from eBay, but then I wondered what would be the safe way to "escape" the cap. I'm used to a 30-sec approach time when I stop the coil and have to go fiddle. With a pulse cap, I'd probably get myself zapped. What do you guys use for bleeders on those things?
On my HV gear using pulse caps, I have a HV relay that shorts the cap when power is not applied. There's a big 300W resistor in series to limit the discharge current (and excitement when the relay closes. OTOH, we're talking about 30 uF at 20-30kV here, which is probably more energy than you'll have in a tesla coil.
Also, before actually touching anything, I use a pair of grounding hooks with series 1k resistors to limit the current to about 20A. Attach hooks to cap terminals, wrap wire across terminals, done.
On a MMC, it's nice to have resistors because shorting the ends of a string of capacitors does not guarantee that the capacitors in the string are discharged (imagine two caps charged to 1kV and -1kV in series).
You could just string a bunch of 10 Meg resistors in series and use it as a bleeder.
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