JJ cap can question

[eric_d]

Hey all... was thinking about power supplies and uses for the JJ 40+20+20+20 cap can and wondered what would happen if you put another electrolytic cap in series with the can (i.e. off the ground of the can).

Normally capacitance would change (halved if the caps had the same value) and voltage handling would increase (doulbe if the same value), right?

Since the JJ can should be able to handle all of the voltage on its own, I'm guessing this should work voltage-wise. (Or would it fry?)

But something's making me think the charge stored would change (or could that one cap really effect the capacitance of the four it's in series with normally?).

This is theoretical as I don't have the JJ can in front of me to test it out. But I was thinking this would be a way to try out different levels of filtering by changing just one cap...

(Please forgive me if the answer is obvious, I'm kind of new to all of this...)

[Bruce / Mission Amps]

Not really obvious to a novice builder but I think it won't work the way you'd think it would... yes the voltage of any given section will be higher then the standard 500v rating.
If you draw it descrete you'll see that the common ground of the upper cap will feed all the + voltage from any one of the upper cap sections to all or one of a cap section below... in with no particular order except that the "impedance" of the 40uF cap section is different then the 20uF sections and the actual true voltage division will suffer because of that.