Re: Are these TDK HV Capacitors any good ? ? ?

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Ed Phillips by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <evp-at-pacbell-dot-net>

Tesla list wrote:
 >
 > Original poster: "Ben McMillen by way of Terry Fritz 
<teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <spoonman534-at-yahoo-dot-com>
 >
 > Hi all,
 >    I've been under the impression that if you're not gonna
 > use these caps (ceramic doorknob) for lasers or HV
 > filtering then they're bad news.. especially with the
 > hazard of exploding and sending ceramic shards everywhere..
 > :-/
 >
 > Coiling In Pittsburgh
 > Ben McMillen

	I've had good luck using ordinary Sprague ceramic HV FILTER capacitors
with my little coil powered by a 12 kV, 60 ma NST.  They work nearly as
well as a good transmit mica, and are a lot more convenient in size.
They're pretty lossy but if the run times are kept to a minute or less
(pretty long if the neighbors know you're interfering with them) they
don't overheat enough to cause problems.  Their capacitance changes as
they warm up enough to notice.  I blew up a couple of them through
overheating when I first tried them.  Failure mode was puncture with
resulting cracked ceramic puck.

	One good thing about monolythic ceramic capacitors is that their ESR is
very low.

Ed