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More on small caps (with a bang)
Haunted by the disappointing performance of the capacitor I previously
constructed (110 pF), I returned to the same PCB's and found a total of 8
100 nF X2-rated capacitors. I thought to myself, that's too little, there's
no way they'll take that much punishment. But still I was determined to try
it out. A 12.5 nF cap is over a hundred times bigger than what I had earlier!
Well, they worked better (scared the hell out of my wife - the spark gap got
a LOT louder!) but not really well. Now the fluorescent lamp gets a bit more
noticeably lit, it's just that nothing "great" happens. Is my power supply
so pitifully small that it can't feed the secondary properly? Or is the thing
so mis-tuned that there's no chance it would work anyway...
There is only one problem - during a longer "run" (relatively speaking,
actually it was only 10-15 seconds or so) the spark gap started to die off,
and one of the caps in the string (probably a polyester metallized foil one)
died with an audible pop. Open circuit, nothing further bad could happen, but
now I really feel like the weekend is too long (and the mail could travel
faster!) while waiting for the caps to arrive.