RE: gmheicslr --- uh oh...once again!

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

Original poster: "Steve Conner" <steve.conner-at-optosci-dot-com> 

 >Caps are pretty tough... dont put it past
 >me to push a 600V cap to 1kv ;-)

I tried pushing some of the CDE 942 series 1uF 1000V caps to 1200V. At
around 1250V they started to make small ticking noises. Well, some part of
my apparatus did, and I wasn't about to put my ear up close to it to find
out what. Instead I hooked up a scope with a HV probe, and I could see that
with every "tick", the voltage dropped to about 900V, then the power supply
recharged it.

This looked to me like the behaviour of a self-healing film capacitor.
Surely an ordinary arc in air (or a catastrophic failure of the 1200V IGBTs
I was testing with this jerry-rigged DC supply) would have gone FLASH-BANG
and discharged the cap bank completely?

Steve C.