Yeah those camera capacitors aren't fun to get hit by. I was converting my friend's old digital camera into an infrared one and I forgot to discharge the capacitor, when I touched the cap it didn't feel so good!
One time I used flash camera caps to build tazer gloves for me and my friend. We then proceeded to have an epic duel with them.
Edit: All this talk of capacitors made me want to fire up some big old capacitors I got out of an ancient printer about ten years ago. They've been sitting around untouched until now. I'm gonna power them up in an hour or so because my parents aren't home right now and they don't want me to mess with high voltage stuff without anyone around.
my biggest caps are 8000 MFD at 80Volt (x2) in power supply for my amplifier... that's a fair few joules... but it's not the biggest ever...
which according to http ://www.electronics2000.co.uk/calc/caclchrg.htm is
25.6 Joules
Now your standard bottle of Classic Coke is 140 Calories
which works out as 1 cal = 4.187 J
so 1 coke = 586 Joules
so i would need about 23 of my power caps to equal the energy provided by one coke.
but i can (safely) discharge my capacitor in 11 (or less) seconds which works out too 25.6Joules/11sec=277.6 Watts
and i can't discharge a coke nearly so fast... (even if you shake it! )
[edit:updated technical details]
I have 10KV capacitors, about 20 of them, i was making a marx generator, but then i found a laser Oh and those caps are impressive turtlecannon, but i've seen MUCH bigger! ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
i got the 10kv ones from RS components, i was intending to build a small tesla coil with the left overs, but my NST's didn't work, so that idea was scrapped.
Wait, so if you hook up a cap to a power scorce, and let it charge, then dischare it for a huge spark? is that how it works? Im a electronis noob.... :-[
hahaha that capacitor is tiny compared to these!http://theelectrostore.com/shopsite...apacitors/capacitor_energy_Maxwell100kV_1.jpg I have used one of these caps before, at another guys house with a tesla coil, he had like 4 in parallel! Yep DWL, just charge em up, then short em out. Although some capacitors don't like that much, so they may not last all that long, but its heaps of fun while it lasts. If your capacitor doesn't have enough capacitance, you will not get a very big spark. 4700uf works well for small sparks, and camera capacitor for a medium spark, and the ones in my pic for sparks that will blow up chunks of metal! ;D
4kJ sparks?!?
He does coin shrinking, can cutting and nice "metal fireworks" with his 400lb caps
I also recently harvested several nice caps, four 80V 50-something mF, as well as a 2,1µF (@2100V) cap.
Microwaves have some nice caps inside them as well as the appropriate charging equipment whereas amps have nice low-voltage high-capacity caps.
the sparks on the tesla in the pic on the front page are defenitely Photo-Shop, my uncle has like a 10 foot tall tesla, those sparks in that pic are indeed FAKE
HOLY MOTHER F***** JESUS F***ING CHRIST!!! THAT IS A HUGE CAPACITOR!!!! I defenitely do NOT want to touch THAT when its charged... I didnt know they made those!!! how many uF???? JEEZ.... I shud make a driver circuit with one of those....