Grindcore by Tube Time

When your function generator dies, you never know what you’ll find inside. Maybe it will be a blown tantalum capacitor, or maybe it will be an ongoing art project with followers all over social media.

In his case, engineer Eric Schlaepfer found both. He wanted to see if there was an obvious failure point visible in the capacitor, so he sanded it in half to inspect, and posted it on Twitter. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, so Eric just kept grinding away at other components.

“Some of them look quite surprising inside, and many of them look quite beautiful,” Schlaepfer says. “Most people know what a headphone plug looks like, but the inside is quite interesting. Many people think this LED lookslike an album cover. One of my favorites has to be this electrolytic capacitor [above] — it has a neat spiral pattern inside!”

His process is pretty low-tech. Each component is simply sanded with normal sandpaper to reveal the internal structures. Sometimes, a piece may require the additional step of a hacksaw to take care of the bulk of the work, then sandpaper to finish. However, Schlaepfer sees a possible upgrade in the future in the form of a diamond saw and polisher.

You can find see more component cross sections in Eric’s book, Open Circuits, or on tubetime.us.

This article appeared in Make: Vol. 71.