Jeff Liebermann wrote:



Those are the classic symptoms of a defective electrolytic capacitor.


** Or several OR a dry solder joint or many of them.



After some provocation by Phil Allison, I ran a temperature test on
various electrolytic capacitors:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/Electrolytic-cap-test/
Simple setup:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/Electrolytic-cap-test/test-setup.jpg




** You went to lot of trouble to see the obvious.

All I did was try a few 450V electros, heat them with a hot air gun until they were darn uncomfortable to hold and note that in every case the ESR reading had plumeted by 5 to 10 times.

Then I found some graphs on-line that backed up the finding.


There are a number of different ESR meters available.


** I use the same one as in your pics - the Bob Parker design. He lives not far from me and we have conversed about that an many other electronics matters.

Have you tried your meter to test the ESR of cells ?

Easy to tell if a Lithium memory cell is good or not - also good on NiCds, NiMH and alkalines.

Also reads low value resistors, even if there is an inductor or transformer winding across one.


..... Phil