<VV> This day in History 37 years ago....

[Tony Underwood]

At 04:25 hours 05/14/2006, Dennis & Debbie PLEAU wrote:
>It's that easy, at work we make them with a few hundred angstroms of 
>metal a few hundred angstroms of essentially glass and then another 
>few hundred angstroms of metal.
>
>dp
>
>
>   re : You *can* repair a flip-flop with a capacitor!
>
>   You can make a capacitor out of two license plates and a piece of 
> cardboard,
>   too, and it will at least get you home !



The only capacitor I ever made was hooked to a Tesla coil.   It 
consisted of several sheets of glass separating sheets of 
alternatingly connected aluminum foil in a glass baking dish filled 
with motor oil, connected across the primary coil winding, which was 
of course attached to your standard garden variety neon transformer 
with a spark gap to provide some high freq "oscillations" to drive 
the primary coil.

Large sparks resulted, spraying from the top electrode of the 
secondary coil.   *Large* sparks.  Scary stuff.   I was afraid to get 
close to the thing... fried and fizzled and crackled like a Sci-Fi 
film prop.    Almost nothing would stop the blue spraying sparks... I 
perched an upside-down dinner glass over the top of the secondary 
coil winding's electrode (a nail) and it even sprayed sparks through 
the glass.

The whole thing was made from junk stuff, mostly telephone line wire 
wrapped around cardboard forms and glass I got from the hardware 
store, and the transformer that someone gave me.    This is what I 
get for watching those Mr Wizard shows on Saturday mornings... and 
then finding plans in an electronics hobbyist book.

Not likely to happen these days; liability issues and such...  ;)

I played with some strange stuff as a child.   Then eventually I 
bought a Corvair...



tony..