[sdiy] [AH] Arp Solina with excessive chorus noise

[Gordonjcp]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 10:26:04PM +0000, Chris Juried wrote:
> Agreed, Tom. Strap an ESR meter to those caps and watch the resistance shoot up. Replace them and watch you AC ripple fall.  Sincerely,   

Unlikely.  Except in cheap crappy switched-mode power supplies, electrolytics just don't fail.  Maybe if you're working on equipment that was built in and has not been switched on since the 1950s or 1960s, you'd have a problem.

In roughly 30 years of repairing electronic equipment I've replaced maybe half a dozen genuinely faulty electrolytics (save the aforementioned cheap crappy SMPSUs - if I never see an Amstrad satellite TV receiver again it'll still be too soon).  Disc ceramic and tantalum bead capacitors are a different story altogther.

Incidentally, I automatically charge an extra 300 quid to even carry something that's been "re-capped" in from the car, never mind take the screws out.  Every single piece of equipment I've seen that has been "re-capped" has had significant faults, made worse by the "HERP DERP IT NO WORKY MUST BE CAPACITATORS" mentality that leads people to fuck about with the insides blindly.  Generally it takes a full day of work to get anything "re-capped" to even run at all, never mind correctly.

Never, *ever* "re-cap" things.  If it has a fault, fix it.  It won't be an electrolytic capacitor.

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Gordonjcp MM0YEQ