Testing the TK Tar Baby

[picowatt]

You want a capacitor discharge story?  I have one but I am bending the definition a bit.

In the 70s Vivtar made a great electronic flash for SLR cameras.  It was big and beefy and it had a fresnel lens attachment for telephoto flash.  You could pivot the whole flash head up 45 degrees for "bounce flash" off the ceiling for more softly lit flash photos.  The reason I mention this is because it was in "power boost" mode when you used the "bounce flash."

So myself and my best friend were hanging out and we first "got small."   We sat in the dark for 20 minutes so our pupils opened up fully.  We took the flash and put translucent multi-coloured plastic pieces from a Risk board game on top of the fresnel lens flash hood and put the flash in "bounce flash" mode.  We covered the light meter on the flash so that it would discharge all of it's energy.

Then, staring down at the flash hood covered with all of the coloured plastic pieces in the pitch dark.....

KAAA-BOOOOOM!!!!!!   lol

Talk about seeing stars!!!   The afterimage must have lasted five minutes!!!!

I still have one of those flashes in working condition for my old Canon A1 film camera.  Sometimes I would turn it on before I mounted it to the shoe to get it charging for a quick shot and accidentally hit the trigger button on the back while mounting it and looking straight into it. 

So much for the quick shot, you don't see much but that spot in front of you for a while...

[picowatt]

A lot of caps in the mid 90s, SM can electrolytic, would leak on the board and corrode local circuitry and traces. Multilayer boards, fugidaboudit.  When you touch them with a soldering iron, it smells of putrid cat pee.  Camcorders were the worst for this problem.

My boss at the time was fighting a lawsuit because an electrolytic cap on a TV board popped and the can hit him in the eye. The top of the cap didnt split.

MaGs

That was indeed a bad time for cap leakage.

There were lots of issues with electrolytics leaking back then.  Whoever the suppliers were of those capacitors, they must have supplied a lot of caps because that problem showed up in just about everything electronic for a time.  A little bit of brown and some fuzzy green traces and you immediately knew what the problem was.

[TinselKoala]

Hehe.... back in the day, at Building 29, Alameda NAS in the SF Bay area....  (check it out on Google earth)

I was doing some wire explosion work, using a Bonetti machine to charge up the wire explosion apparatus, where I used a big 0.3 microFarad, 60 kV Maxwell pulse cap for the storage, and an overvolting air gap for the trigger, made up of two big stainless steel bowls with the bottoms facing. When the gap was set right, it would trigger right at 60 kV and send the cap's entire 500 Joules or so through the wire target (and a few microH of inductance for pulse shaping.) It sounded like a gunshot when the wire exploded in its platen.

One day I was doing this with nobody around, and for some reason the gap didn't fire. I looked at it, got the "jesus pole" and went to trigger it with that.... and the capacitor exploded. This is a "big" cap, about 2 feet long, 8x4 inches, terminals on the long ends, oil, copper foil and paper inside. It exploded and the oil caught on fire and there were several burning spots around the lab space. I got the fires put out, and went to put a safety jumper across the remains, the half-cap shell with the terminals .... and managed to brush against the terminals with both hands somehow.

When I woke up I was across the room on my back.  I later found that the air gap was misadjusted and there was likely 100 kV on the cap when I triggered it.

[TinselKoala]

PW:

I think a few of us suspect that "Equipe NERD" is just Rosemary and a few cats.  And that's not slang for cool dudes or dudettes.  lol

Well... she's got Yousaidwhat.... or is it Youknowwho......  but since that person can't seem to put together a logical or even coherent argument either, they are still pretty badly off.

[polln8r]

When I woke up I was across the room on my back.  I later found that the air gap was misadjusted and there was likely 100 kV on the cap when I triggered it.

Holy crap, man!