Ignoramus27088 wrote:
- A shorting stick (also made of junk steel) with a wooden broomhandle


At the olde ion beam lab, we used pvc or fiberglass handles, not wood.
Wood would be a poor choice. And a resistor (a big honking 50W resistor,
which the Lab's EE assured inquiring minds WOULD NOT be surviving a full
discharge - this is a safety tool used to approach supposedly discharged
capacitors and be damn sure that they are discharged before you touch
them, not a device to discharge them through, other than that last few
hundred volts which is more than enough to kill you...) Speaking of
which, you never want to store these things without having them shorted,
solidly. A HV capacitor which is just sitting around can collect a
lethal mount of static. If they did not come to you pre-shorted, someone
was not behaving responsibly at fermilab.

It's been a few decades, so I don't recall the precise size of the banks
involved, but even the little bitty ones made a bang of unholy
proportions, and spewed a fine dose of X-rays around the discharge area
as well. Nobody but nobody got anywhere near the things when they were
charged, and they lived in tanks full of transformer oil to keep the
terminals from arcing over in the air. The big one (many capacitors)
sounded a bit like dropping a V-8 engine from 3 stories, and vaporized
the electrodes every time it was fired.

If the capacitors are oil-filled, and they probably are, you need to
verify (or make the seller verify) that they are free of PCBs, or you
are in for a world of trouble disposing of them in any way. They should
not have sold them if they were, but you need to be sure.

In short, you really do not want to test these to anywhere near their
capacity. Your HV supply is not suitable, and if it was, you'd be
looking at a world of hurt without investing a few thousand in test
gear. You could test them in a low-voltage RC circuit, I suppose, but
for all actual purposes which they might be used, it's not very relevant.

--
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