i said to myself, (i talk to myself a lot?) now there is a capacitor. since a capacitor is basicaly two conductors seperated by a nonconductor, i thought i could use aluminum foil tape too coat the cup, up to about 1" from the top, then use a strip of foil, taped to the cup and put it inside another cup, this would create one cell of a capacitor, two cells placed together with the conducting strips oposit each other, would make a circuit, or one capacitor. i did this and filled the cups with about three tablespoons of salt water for a good conducting, air free filler. the first one i made, i used three cups, cup-foil-cup-foil-cup, when i mesured the capacitance of the cap, i was very surprised to find it read 1.5nf, that's .0015 micro farad, this was definatly looking like a cap could be built up for tesla duty. now the next thing i did was to measure the thickness of the plastic cup, this would give an idea of the amount of voltage that the cap could take and survive in tesla duty. as a general rule, i use .001" is good for 500v, this is the way that i guestimated my flat plate caps for dielectric pierce through voltage, of coarse the cups seem to have a much more uniform thickness then most of the sheet plastic i have used.

it is highly posible that 1000v per mill (.001") could be expected but that is for further testing. i decided to build a capacitor using a two cup cell, cup-foil-cup-cup-foil-cup, i thought it would be best to build the first one in the slopiest, quickest maner posible, slap it together and see, so to speak.

as you can see, i just wraped foil around the cup, formed it roughly to shape with my hand and pushed it inside another cup and pushed, turned, pressed, squished, untill it felt smooth. when i took it out i was very surprised to see such a smooth formed foil plate, verry good sign.

this created one cell, i repeated this for the remainder of the cups. after i got the whole stack compleated, alternating the strips from side to side, i taped the strips together, up the side with foil tape, i used a half width of tape but a full width holds it to the cup better. after finished i placed it in a container and filled it with mineral oil.

as you can see the cap fired very well, i let it fire for quite some time with no failure. i then decided to hook it up to my potential transformer, with 100 volts input@300-1 winding ratio, i put a full 30,000 volts through the cap and spark gap, it fired fine for about 10 minuts or more, only giving two blubs when it arced over from plate too strips.


	party cup cap while sitting at my computer desk one day, i happened to look into the kitchen, there setting on my hoosier cabinet was a stack of those cheap plastic cups that will probably be discovered in an arciological dig in the year 3569ad. i said to myself, (i talk to myself a lot?) now there is a capacitor. since a capacitor is basicaly two conductors seperated by a nonconductor, i thought i could use aluminum foil tape too coat the cup, up to about 1" from the top, then use a strip of foil, taped to the cup and put it inside another cup, this would create one cell of a capacitor, two cells placed together with the conducting strips oposit each other, would make a circuit, or one capacitor. i did this and filled the cups with about three tablespoons of salt water for a good conducting, air free filler. the first one i made, i used three cups, cup-foil-cup-foil-cup, when i mesured the capacitance of the cap, i was very surprised to find it read 1.5nf, that's .0015 micro farad, this was definatly looking like a cap could be built up for tesla duty. now the next thing i did was to measure the thickness of the plastic cup, this would give an idea of the amount of voltage that the cap could take and survive in tesla duty. as a general rule, i use .001" is good for 500v, this is the way that i guestimated my flat plate caps for dielectric pierce through voltage, of coarse the cups seem to have a much more uniform thickness then most of the sheet plastic i have used. it is highly posible that 1000v per mill (.001") could be expected but that is for further testing. i decided to build a capacitor using a two cup cell, cup-foil-cup-cup-foil-cup, i thought it would be best to build the first one in the slopiest, quickest maner posible, slap it together and see, so to speak. as you can see, i just wraped foil around the cup, formed it roughly to shape with my hand and pushed it inside another cup and pushed, turned, pressed, squished, untill it felt smooth. when i took it out i was very surprised to see such a smooth formed foil plate, verry good sign. i then took a strip of foil and folded it a few times to make a long strip, i slid it under the foil plate on the cup and put it back inside the cup, thus this created one cell, i repeated this for the remainder of the cups. after i got the whole stack compleated, alternating the strips from side to side, i taped the strips together, up the side with foil tape, i used a half width of tape but a full width holds it to the cup better. after finished i placed it in a container and filled it with mineral oil. after measuring the capacitance of 2.2nf i hooked it up to a neon sign transformer. first pic, spark without cap, second, with cap. as you can see the cap fired very well, i let it fire for quite some time with no failure. i then decided to hook it up to my potential transformer, with 100 volts input@300-1 winding ratio, i put a full 30,000 volts through the cap and spark gap, it fired fine for about 10 minuts or more, only giving two blubs when it arced over from plate too strips.