How to get the most bang for your buck?

[Evil Lurker]

I seem to have aquired a fairly decent collection of crap primary caps, ie 200v 330-470uf capxcom, sus'con, fuhjyuu so on and so forth.

How do I get them to explode in the most violent manner?

[Jack Crow]

Re: How to get the most bang for your buck?

EL,
I suppose the idea is to build up pressure in the case.
Quickly.

I personally have not tried this method.
The physics are 'sound', the act may not be.

Guess you could start with line current.
120vac at 15 amps might be a good start.
Or you can use an old style incan lamp as an inrush current limiter.

I would set off the first few items in a heavy plastic pipe to keep down the frag.
Eye and ear protection is recomended.

Do be safe
Jack Crow in the less than free world.

[mariushm]

Re: How to get the most bang for your buck?

Put them in a sealed plastic bag in the freezer for a few hours.

Get a broken lcd monitor, solder some wires where you have one of those 800-1000v rated capacitors for the inverter, plug the 220v caps there... power the board.

Worst case, you'll get a ton of smoke.

[momaka]

Re: How to get the most bang for your buck?

I say save them and wire them up in series (with 300 kOhm bleeder/load balancing across each). With 10 caps in this configuration, you can get almost 2 kV across them. Assuming they are all 330uF for simplicity, that gives you about 66 J of energy - that's quite a punch there. You can then use that energy to blow other stuff up, like smaller caps and whatnot. Just need to find/build a HV power supply to charge those caps. It shouldn't be too hard, though.

Or if you just plain straight want to blow them out, find a cheap computer PSU (without PFC preferably) and attach one wire to hot ground and the other to the positive rail. You should have about 320 VDC. Now wire the cap you want to blow backwards to that voltage and it should blow up almost instantaneously.

[severach]

Re: How to get the most bang for your buck?

Am I the only one disappointed that the correct answer isn't a 50 cal?

[999999999]

Re: How to get the most bang for your buck?

Fill with c4, insert probes, run.

It would be more time effective to just buy firecrackers.

[Evil Lurker]

Re: How to get the most bang for your buck?

Ok I been thinking about it, and it seems the bigger the cap, the smaller the bang. You get a lot of fizzing and smoke but no real kabooms.

I am thinking a capacitor bank may be the "funnest" use for them. The question is how should I go about charging it up?

I'm thinking maybe about winding my own transformer. I have some semi decent size filtering toroids of unknown core composition. If I were to take some thin wire say, cat 5e strands and wrap say 10 rounds on one part of the coil and put a 1200v rated night light in series to limit the current flowing thru it, and an approximate number of turns in the equivalent ratio as a secondary winding and hook that up to a bridge rectifier, would it be possible to get a low amp voltage source close to 400v?

[momaka]

Re: How to get the most bang for your buck?

I am thinking a capacitor bank may be the "funnest" use for them. The question is how should I go about charging it up?

Depends on how you set up the capacitor bank (i.e. caps in series or caps in parallel).

- if in series, you can get a pretty high voltage
- if in parallel, your maximum voltage cannot exceed the rating on any of the caps

Note: you get more energy storage if the bank of caps is in series since U = 0.5 x C x V^2 where U is the energy, C is the capacitance, and V is the voltage.

Note 2: if you choose to connect the capacitors in series, you need to put high-value resistors across the terminals of each cap to balance the voltage across. 100 kOhms and above recommended.

I'm thinking maybe about winding my own transformer. I have some semi decent size filtering toroids of unknown core composition. If I were to take some thin wire say, cat 5e strands and wrap say 10 rounds on one part of the coil and put a 1200v rated night light in series to limit the current flowing thru it, and an approximate number of turns in the equivalent ratio as a secondary winding and hook that up to a bridge rectifier, would it be possible to get a low amp voltage source close to 400v?

If you want to use a small core and a thin wire, then the AC sent on the primary coil should be fairly high frequency (in the KHz range).

As I gave you the suggestion in my previous post above the other day, I tried a small experiment with a monitor flyback and a computer PSU. I put about 20 turns around the exposed flyback core and hooked that to the unrectified output of the 5vsb of the computer PSU. Result - enough voltage from the flyback to make a small arc between the HV and return pins on the flyback from a 5mm distance. That's above 1 kV there, low current.

It would be more time effective to just buy firecrackers.

Not where I live. I'd have to go to West Virginia or one of them states that lets you buy that stuff.
I find it kind of funny (and a bit disturbing) that it's easier to buy a gun around here than it is to buy firecrackers.

[lti]

Re: How to get the most bang for your buck?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiaxKYLRi5o

I wonder how well 5mm and 6mm diameter caps explode. I have a collection of small caps that have failed. I'll have to blow one up some day.

Maybe you could seal the vents on larger caps.

[Uranium-235]

Re: How to get the most bang for your buck?

the best bang for your buck...

stick it up a deers ass, THEN apply 300v in the reverse direction