flashing led help

Buy some 555 ic's. You'll have hours of fun making leds flash

 

I take it you want to make the LED flash?
A capacitor is not a flashing circuit all by itself. It does let current flow until it fills up, but then it stops and that's the end. You could get the LED to flash just once. If you hooked up a switch to dump the capacitor, then you could get the LED to flash once each time you press the switch, but not on it's own. You have to keep pressing the switch each time.

You can probably buy flasher circuits that do exactly what you expected form the capacitor, but you can easily make your own.

A 555 timer is a very easy chip to work with. (And pretty cheap, so it's not the end of the world if you destroy it.). Wikipedia has a great page on it. It can work a number of different ways, but, if you look in the "modes" section, one mode is "Astable." That's the one for making the 555 turn on and off over and over. It only takes the 555, 2 resistors and 2 capacitors to make it work. In wikipedia's schematic, it has a little red squiggely line next to "out." You would hook your diode and a 3rd capacitor from there to ground.

There are other ways, of course, but that's what I would use.

On the other hand.. if your just trying to learn about capacitors and how they work... Well, you just learned that they don't make an LED flash all by themselves.

--tim
Edit:I agree with markm6164 :endEdit

 

Depending on your end goal there are solid state flashing LEDs that require no additional circuit to flash...

As Harald Kapp touched upon, use a resistor for the LED in almost all cases, even if the max supply voltage is in the 'safe' range for LED based on the datasheet, even if it's just a 1 Ohm resistor in your case... There are instances when you can skip the resistor when you are using a current regulated supply, or when using a button or coin cell battery that has a high enough internal resistance and low max discharge rate that will almost certainly never overcome the LED...

Also Google up 2 transistor LED flasher, for a simple flashing circuit...

 

Electronics-DIY.com has a Flashing LED circuit with an FM transmitter. Don't think they use 555 IC's at all.

I've been away from Basic Electronics for a while, but thought 555's were Timing chips.

Really amazed how they've come along or maybe how I'm seen them used now days. This compared to my beginning stages of electronic knowledge.