Making while brown: Texas schoolchild arrested for bringing homemade clock to school

[ficuswhisperer]

@shaddack

…Unless you have a big old cap, I think it was 500uF/35V, so old it was about 3/4" diameter and 2.5" long, old enough to be old when I wasn’t born yet. It survived for a couple minutes on a lead-acid battery charger (the biggest PSU I had access to, for feeding a Tesla coil), then it exploded with a loud bang, filled the desk with its guts and the entire room with white smoke. There’s still a small stain on the wall, 25 years later.

I’ve never had a cap explode with anything more than the force of an anemic firecracker. To get anything even remotely bomb like you’d need something positively massive:

1 Farad Autohifi Capacitor Explosion with slow motion [1080p]

… and even that wouldn’t work well as a bomb. Besides, there’s far more pedestrian ways to create explosions.