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Comment by verytrivial

6 years ago

Anyone who's not ducked capacitor shrapnel isn't really an electrical/electronic engineer. Perhaps he was leaving you with an initiation ritual.

5 comments

verytrivial

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peteri  6 years ago

Very true, I remember many years ago when working at Soundcraft, there was a loud bang from next door as a small mixing desk with builtin amp was powered on for the first time[1].

Large electrolytic smoothing caps fitted the wrong way round, the smell is horrendous.

[1] By Douglas Self who has an excellent page about subjectivity in HiFi http://douglas-self.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm

marcosdumay  6 years ago

Normal (not utility scale) capacitors do not blow up anymore. You can plug them on the wrong way directly on the rectified mains, they bubble, expand, get hot, and smell; they don't blow.

  • setquk  6 years ago

    They do explode quite violently still. I’ve blown up tens of new ones.

    Try an average Chinese or even rubicon 10uF 63v ish cap which is in just about every bit of crap from SMPS to cheap toys. They go with quite a Big Bang.