anamouse ) wrote:
: Can someone help me identify these capacitors?

: Thanks for all who can help me deciper and understand the code!

Although I hate to point out when someone is on the wrong track, you are on
the wrong track.

These capacitors, in my opinion, will probably out live you and your
children, possibly grandchildren. These are all mylar caps probably seeing
an audio level signal around 500mv at best. Although anything can happen to
a device, it's not likely any of these are bad or went bad through the
years.

Being the "Capehart" name, is probably more likely one of them is the wrong
value which was put in at the factory. Your problem, if I read it right was
something happening to the bass when the volume went up. That is a pretty
open wide complaint, likely to be a transistor or electrolytic cap in the
audio amplifier section. At least that is where I would start poking around.

Anyway, as far as reading the caps, generally anything marked 25, 50 or 100
(with or without the v after it) is going to be the max operating voltage.
It's not likely to be of much importance in this case. General rule of thumb
if you are going to replace any or all of them is equal or greater is fine.
So if you run into a 104k 50v and can only find a 104k 100v, go for it.
Won't make any difference.

I also wouldn't worry about the R's N's, those probably are tolerences and
would have little to no effect if a better grade was found. At least in this
application. Again, general rule of thumb.

The numbers before the K's and M's are the values, along with some written
out (in the picture with the orange 222k's the greens appear to be .015 or
..045). I've seen the "rule of conversion" argued before because there are
exceptions to this scheme, but the general rule of thumb with these is that
the first 2 numbers are the value with the 3rd being how many zeros to use
with the value. The arguement is what you do with the zeroes.

Anyway, this would be a limited conversion...

marked 221 would be 220pf
marked 222 would be 2200pf or .0022uf
marked 223 would be .022uf (i don't consider 22000pf a real value)
marked 224 would be .22uf

Anything larger (225) would more likely be an electrolytic and marked
longhand (2.2uf).

Just switch the first two digits with the above for the others, one marked
473 is the same as 223, just 47 instead of 22, so that would be .047uf. Only
point of confusion are the 10's, but is the same (102 is .001 or 1000pf, 103
would be .01, 104 is a .1, 105 would be 1.0uf).

But being the difficulty in replacing these and my original point about
being on the wrong track, might be a good excerise in soldering if you
wanted to replace all of these (along with a lesson about working in close
quarters (good luck finding dial string these days)), it just isn't going to
fix anything.

-bruce