David Hobby wrote:
>
> Andrew Crystall wrote:
> ...
> > > Look, I don't want PLANS! I just don't believe you
> > > made it, and you've done nothing to dispel this.
> > > How about 20 questions?
> > >
> > > 1) Did it use an explosion?
> >
> > A capacitor. Which expoded once when I was test firing it.
> > This design flaw fortunately was kinda-antipated and it missed me.
...
> A good thing it did. Big capacitors can store a lot
> of energy. So all I need to do is pick up a 100KV, 20 Farad
> capacitor, from that war surplus store by Area 51...
>
> ---David
Funny, I can't even find the building anymore. Now
where am I going to get all my experimental supplies?
So it sounds like we need to scale back the size of
the capacitor some. I googled a bit, and found an archived
exchange at:
http://yarchive.net/metal/large_capacitors.html
I've snipped it some, but this seems to be about what you
can get.
> >
> >>The suggestion of using capacitor discharge sounds like a good idea to
> >>me. It would not be expensive or complex if made from surplus equipment,
> >>although it would not be very practical for commercial sale. A 1000
> >>microfarad capacitor bank at 1000 volts gives 500 joules which is in the
> >>order of the energy of powder charges used for fire forming typical
> >>cases.
...
>
> Back to the capacitor discharge methods, if anyone still cares...
> At least in the Phoenix area you can find large capacitor fairly
> cheap. Oil caps which are at about the limit of what a person
> can lift are used for power line correction. A few of them in
> parallel should do the job nicely. They're designed for AC but
> will handle DC ok. Some have built in bleeder resistors, but
> that wouldn't hurt this use. One might use electrolytics in
> series/parallel with diodes and resistors to prevent reversing
> the polarity, but they aren't the best for pulse work.
>
> It's not hard to build a triggered spark gap which will handle
> thousands of amps. Three metal disks in a row. THe middle one
> is connected to a spark coil and held at a voltage halfway between
> the other two until time to fire. THen a pulse of either polarity
> will break down one size, with the other following immediately.
> Plain air will carry the current.
...
---David
ROU Zap!
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