(no subject)

On the way to dinner with Peter Tork and company a few days ago, I saw a collection of big electrical equipment laying in someone's yard. I told myself that I couldn't stop and get them becuase they weren't really out on the curb and I'd be late for dinner. Then, on the way back, they were still there. One of my reasons for not picking them up was gone. Still, I didn't quite have the courage to go and grab them. I thought maybe I would come by next morning before work and see if they were still there. Alas, I didn't have time.

But Moira did! She went back for me during the day and found them sitting out in front of the house with a big 'free' sign on them. She snarfed them and surprised me with them at the end of the day. But I was pretty busy with the concert going on and didn't have a chance to look at them.

Finally, that weekend, I got outside and hauled the three units out of her car and into the garage. At first I was dissapointed. They only had two terminals! I thought they were big oil-filled transformers at first, but myabe the were just giant batteries! I felt so dissapointed. But upon closer inspection, I found that they were, in fact, much cooler than that. They might not be transformers, but they were something possibly just as good: high voltage capacitors!

( Click here to see the pictures of them. )

I have one smaller unit that's a 13.5kv cap and two bigger units that are a whopping 15kv! That's a lot of voltage! The big one is labeled 1MF: is that a mega-farad or a micro-farad? Does anyone know? I would guess it's a mega-farad by the capital 'M', but that's a really big cap, isn't it? posicat, have you ever used anything like these before?

I promised my love that I won't do anything with them until I am one-hundred percent certain that I'm not going to, as my brothers and I might say, permanently inconvenience myself, but I am terribly excited about having these things. The first thing that comes to mind for them is in the power system of a can crusher. I don't think it's quite enough power for coin-shrinking; that would be so much fun to do someday. This sort of big high voltage capacitor is exepensive; I'm so excited that I found these!

In less geeky news, the library is starting to come together. I'm cleaning up space in there so that, in addition to being the library, it can be my pretty raccoon's Ebay office. I have a picture up: isn't it so pretty! And the books are nice too. *grins* Books books books!

There will be more here soon; I spent a while last night writing something more serious as I lay in bed with one of my new laptops (the one that works), but it's not done yet. Don't give up on my though! I haven't been saying too much here lately but I'm still reading, and trying very hard to find time to write. It should be much easier with this concert out of the way... and I will be writing about that too, at least a little.