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