Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie

[Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 06 January 2006 23:52, Dan McMahill wrote:
>> Unforch, the one pair of jumpers I missed on the schematic had left
>> the vibrator (remember those?) and plate transformer still wired for
>> 6 volts.  The radio worked great on 12 volts, until one of the
>> filter cans made a dent about 1/2" deep in the plaster ceiling.  The
>> kids, trying to get some sleep upstairs, thought I was shooting at
>> them.
>>
>> Messy, took a couple of hours to clean that up.  Stinky too. 
>> Probably had over 600 volts on 450 volt rated caps.
>
>funny.  In my case it was my parents who thought I was up to no good
>when I made a very loud bang at 2AM back in high school days.  And
> yes, those caps do stink.  Probably nasty stuff for human consumption
> too.

Sort of, but we know better than to ingest it while your pets think is 
sweet and lap it up, leading to death a goodly portion of the time. The 
stink is the combination of burnt kraft paper used to seperate the 
foils, and the common anti-freeze ethylene glycol's burning byproducts.
The same stuff you can smell behind an automobile with a cracked head or 
head gasket.

The 'technical grade' of ethylene glycol used in electrolytic caps is 
many times purer than the stuff used in auto radiators though. Back in 
the mid-70's when the petro squeeze was on the first time, antifreeze 
that winter was up into the $13 a gallon area, and I created a 
nationwide semi-shortage of electrolytic caps that winter by running 
down the last barrel of the good stuff in the country (it was only 125 
miles away, on the Mobil warehouses dock in Omaha at the time) and 
buying it for a water cooled tv transmitter which required the pure 
stuff else a pair of $150,000 klystrons could be trashed by the 
internal electralisis the regular stuff would have allowed.  It was 
that, or sign off KNXE-TV for the winter.  As it was destined for 
another customer, I had to talk fast to get it.  As the original 
customer probably had a fixed price contract, they probably welcomed 
the chance to get what the traffic would bear.  ISTR the PO I cut in 
NETV's name was for about 850-900 dollars for that 55 gallon drum.

ISTR that barrel was sitting there waiting for shipping orders to 
Sprague, who had a plant in eastern Nebraska at the time.  55 gallons 
of it will make a heck of a lot of electrolytic caps as it only takes a 
few drops to soak the paper sufficiently.

>-Dan

-- 
Cheers, Gene
People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word
'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's
stupid bounce rules.  I do use spamassassin too. :-)
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.