We have been featuring some home made capacitors this week, and [Mike] wrote in to share his with us. While rolled capacitors are nice, they can be somewhat difficult to construct and grow to unwieldy sizes as capacitance and voltages increase. His solution is to stack the layers up using plastic plates.
In this forum post he explains that using disposable plastic plates and tinfoil you’re able to quickly make a capacitor, that for him was valued at around 12.2nF, using eleven layers . Applying pressure to the stack capacitance grew to about 14nF, though he is having a bit of trouble holding it with just glue.
Testing was conducted with high voltages charging the capacitor up, then its leads were shorted for a nice spark and a good pop. Definitely fun for the next family cook out, though we don’t know how some left over potato salad goo would effect the end results.
Filed under: HackIt
