Re: Panasonic MMC bit the dust...

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: Daniel Hess <dhess1-at-us.ibm-dot-com> 


Brett;

Sorry to hear of your loss. I too am currently running a Terry-inspired 
Panasonic MMC. This thing goes back to the days before the Geek Caps. I 
frequently feel/inspect the MMC after a run and it is always cold to the 
touch. (Well, room temperature anyway). The important thing is that they're 
not even warm. I like to think that the longevity of this cap is because I 
over built it to some degree, 10 strings of 12 caps, (48 nf) but sometimes 
I wonder if I should have made it even beefier? I'm running it on a 15K x 
120 ma NST and a SRSG and at this value, should be about twice the resonate 
value. I also have safety gaps across the RSG and the MMC. The MMC SG has a 
small, aluminum cored inductor in series with this gap so that if/when it 
fires, it doesn't nail the cap so hard. The only time it ever fired was 
during the initial coil setup and it was fairly out of tune. Long live the 
Panasonic MMC!

Thanks for the post,

Daniel




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Original poster: Brett Miller <brmtesla2-at-yahoo-dot-com>

All,

Well, my Terry Fritz inspired MMC (made up of
Panasonic caps) finally died.  During a run of my 6"
system two days ago, I decided to open up the spark
gap a bit more than usual (which I've done many times
over the years) in order to force a few more inches of
output.  There was a flash and then yellow-orange
flame seen through the lexan window on my HDPE mmc
box.  I haven't really had time to do an autopsy or
even a close examination, but I will post pictures for
your enjoyment.