On Tuesday, December 15, 2015 at 1:18:52 PM UTC-5, 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.

I used to do a local vendor's arcade monitors, and I can tell you that a cap that might pass an ESR test may destroy the vertical output on power up when left to sit in an unheated warehouse a week or so during it's route rotation.

I always recapped arcade monitors because of the wild temp extremes they would often see.