Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:54:35 -0700, David Nebenzahl
wrote:

None of these have had any electrolytics fail, so far as I know. So what
gives? Am I just lucky? Did the manufacturers use higher-quality caps
than what's commonly used today?

Chuckle 2.0. Statistics time. Let's pretend that a large quantity of
old electrolytic capacitors were defective. In that case, they would
have died long ago, been recycled, leaving only the good electrolytic
capacitors. 30 years later, all you see are good working ancient
equipment. Not having seen the older blown caps, you might presume
that all ancient electrolytics are reliable over a long term.

I've just had to change a 16uf 450v electrolytic in my Solartron CO 546
signal generator. It's the first one to dry out since the generator was
made in the 1950s but I'm not drawing any statistical conclusions from
that.


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