Ok, here's what I see:

It was potted with some sort of goo to prevent the innards from vibrating.
It looks like it was a single jelly roll electrolytic. It must have shorted
and arced, and the arc melted the foil roll into a glob and the remaining
jelly roll with a globbed end. It did short, and could keep shorting
intermittently. The arcing could also have possibly breached the can,
although clearly not in this case. There may have been design features to
mitigate this possibility.

Peter


"MikeremlaP" wrote in message
...
Hi guys:

Probably getting off topic a bit, although my original concern was safety
of
flight, and things shorting out. Are we agreed that this type of
capacitor
construction is too prone to vibration for aircraft use and that it has a
bad
failure mode?

I cut into the guts of the cap - I'm still clueless. Guess some reading
is in
order on my part. If someone wants to educate me, either on or off
line...

The 2nd cut photo is he

http://www.fotolog.net/palmer_mp/

Mike Palmer
Excellence in Ergonomics