On Friday 06 January 2006 23:52, Dan McMahill wrote: >> Unforch, the one pair of jumpers I missed on the schematic had left >> the vibrator (remember those?) and plate transformer still wired for >> 6 volts. The radio worked great on 12 volts, until one of the >> filter cans made a dent about 1/2" deep in the plaster ceiling. The >> kids, trying to get some sleep upstairs, thought I was shooting at >> them. >> >> Messy, took a couple of hours to clean that up. Stinky too. >> Probably had over 600 volts on 450 volt rated caps. > >funny. In my case it was my parents who thought I was up to no good >when I made a very loud bang at 2AM back in high school days. And > yes, those caps do stink. Probably nasty stuff for human consumption > too.
Sort of, but we know better than to ingest it while your pets think is sweet and lap it up, leading to death a goodly portion of the time. The stink is the combination of burnt kraft paper used to seperate the foils, and the common anti-freeze ethylene glycol's burning byproducts. The same stuff you can smell behind an automobile with a cracked head or head gasket. The 'technical grade' of ethylene glycol used in electrolytic caps is many times purer than the stuff used in auto radiators though. Back in the mid-70's when the petro squeeze was on the first time, antifreeze that winter was up into the $13 a gallon area, and I created a nationwide semi-shortage of electrolytic caps that winter by running down the last barrel of the good stuff in the country (it was only 125 miles away, on the Mobil warehouses dock in Omaha at the time) and buying it for a water cooled tv transmitter which required the pure stuff else a pair of $150,000 klystrons could be trashed by the internal electralisis the regular stuff would have allowed. It was that, or sign off KNXE-TV for the winter. As it was destined for another customer, I had to talk fast to get it. As the original customer probably had a fixed price contract, they probably welcomed the chance to get what the traffic would bear. ISTR the PO I cut in NETV's name was for about 850-900 dollars for that 55 gallon drum. ISTR that barrel was sitting there waiting for shipping orders to Sprague, who had a plant in eastern Nebraska at the time. 55 gallons of it will make a heck of a lot of electrolytic caps as it only takes a few drops to soak the paper sufficiently. >-Dan -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
