Lastly, assuming your capacitor maintained a voltage on it somehow, is it better to use a capaictor discharge stick or a hot stick to discharge the cap or does it matter for a pulse capacitor since puluse capacitors are designed to take rapid voltage reversals? Could you damage the capacitor by hot sticking it?
Distinguish between a "grounding hook" and a "discharge stick".. the discharge stick has a resistor to limit peak current to, say, 5-10Amps and that's what you use to discharge the cap (less stress on components, and more importantly, no big "BANG" that blows little chunks off the terminals and gets people excited).
Once discharged, you can hook up a grounding connection to make sure it stays at low potential. But that can be a clip lead.
Where it gets tricky is when you are discharging a series string of capacitors, because shorting the ends of the string does not guarantee that the components of the string are at zero volts, just that the sum is zero.
You have to do it in stages.. ground one junction with the discharge stick, hook on a cliplead. Ground the next junction, hook on a cliplead, etc.
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