If you’ve seen a big air-variable capacitor, you may have noticed that some of the plates may have slots cut into them. Why? [Mr Carlson] has the answer in the video below. The short answer: you can bend the tabs formed by the slots to increase or decrease the capacitance by tiny amounts for the purpose of tuning.For example, if you have a radio receiver with a dial, you can adjust the capacitor to make certain spots on the dial have an exact frequency. Obviously, you can only adjust in bands depending on how many slots are in the capacitor. Sometimes the adjustments aren’t setting the oscillator’s frequency. For example, the Delco radio he shows uses the capacitor to peak the tuning at the specified frequency.You usually only find the slots on the end plates and, as you can see in the video, not all capacitors have the slots. Of course, bending the plates with or without slots will make things change. Just don’t bend enough to short to an adjacent plate or the fixed plates when the capacitor meshes.Of course, not all variable capacitors have this same design. We’ve seen a lot of strange set ups.