Wine Bottle Capacitors

Making a capacitor out of a wine bottle.

Step 1 Materials

What you will need to make the capacitor:

Empty Wine or Beer Bottle
Salt
Boiling Water
Putty
Scissors
Scotch Tape
Tinfoil
Clear Nail Polish
Knife
Mixing Cup
Goo-Gone (optional it make cleaning the bottles easier)
Wooden BBQ sticks
Vegetable Oil

Comments

[bylerfamily]

Cool,how do you charge it?

[ltnemo2000]

hook up a battery to the terminals. flash circuits from disposable cameras are my personal favorite HV supply. they take AA's and they're free from any drug store. if you just touch the terminals to a 9v you'll store 9v at "about 1nF" (The 4th Doctor). so that's 1/2000000*9^2 joules. (using joules=1/2 of the capacitance times the square of the voltage)

[The 4th Doctor]

i got about 1nF with one of these which isent too shabby stood my dual flybacks at 50KV and works well in my tesla coil does polarity really make any difference? thanks for the idea

[Slick36]

Polarity doesnt really matter, and i use them for my tesla coil too. thanks for measuring the farads because i was just guessing with a capacitor calcutator that came with a program i have...

[and7barton]

I preferred to use champagne bottles on my Tesla Coils - They are much stronger than plain old wine bottles. Other than that I used pretty much the same construction techniques. I was hitting them with 20,000 volts from a bank of neon transformers (in series) and had no problem, though there were some interesting coronal effects on the surface of the oil. I used plain ordinary engine oil, and heavily salted water......so saturated a solution that there was a salt precipitate on the bottom of the bottles. I had something like 30 bottles all linked together, and I stored and operated them in standard plastic bottle crates. All the inter-bottle links were made with short wires with crocodile clips on the ends. I used stainless steel rods inside the bottles, projecting from the tops, and clipped the jumper leads onto the tops of the rods.

[craig c]

hey, I'm obviously not an expert on this hence the possibly silly question, but the foil round the outside is creased alot, wouldn't that give the charge places to discharge the whole thing? but it cools real cool, thanks, might try making one myself =D

[Slick36]

i have found that it really doesnt matter as long as the top of the foil and the top of the bottle are separated. I just started building a tesla coil and i used 14 of these so far but i am gonna try to get like 20-30... BTW im 13 so its really not that hard and if you like HV check out my other instructable Kirlian Photography!