On 12/15/2015 10:16 AM, Cursitor Doom wrote:
On Tue, 15 Dec 2015 07:37:42 -0800, John Robertson wrote:

I must confess we do replace almost all electrolytic caps that are more
than about 30 years old in our vintage game monitors and amplifiers
(video/pinball/jukebox) as this saves a tremendous amount of
troubleshooting time.

Does it, though? I mean, you could save even more time by just running
all the caps through an ESR meter test and just replacing those that
fail. Given how fragile some of those old PCB traces can be, I'd only
want to replace the caps that really way out of spec.


Um, we use temperature controlled soldering irons and the traces on most
of our arcade grade games stand several soldering cycles...

The Bob Parker design ESR meter (which we've been selling since 1999)
doesn't handle small value caps (under 10UFD) very well, and on the
monitors a bunch are 4.7ufd or less.

There are only about fifteen caps in the average monitor, and it takes
about an hour to pull the chassis, replace the caps, do the ring/LOPT
test, check the fuse, reinstall and start the burn-in process. Then it
goes away for five to ten years.

Amps can be worse, particularly early stereo tube amps where all the
parts are connected on standoffs - those can take three to five hours to
recap. They don't come back for ten to twenty years after a recap and
resistor check (tubes too of course).

John :-#)#

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