[cctalk] Re: The magic smoke....

Chuck Guzis wrote: I never "just turn on" equipment that's been out of service for an extended period of time ... until I ... Over the years, I've had good luck "reforming" electrolytic capacitors. Very simple and easy to do, basically: - Disconnect at least one side of the cap. - Connect a variable voltage supply to the cap, through a few hundred ohm serial resistor (this both limits current in case the cap has actually failed, and makes it quite reasonable to do this to several caps in parallel (in this case, either make sure if you left one side connected that it's common (and not the lead from the supply that has the resistor) - or just disconnect both sides. - Start low (a volt or so) - let the cap sit at that voltage for some time (I usually do a few hours - more if the cap is really old/disused) - Make sure cap charges to set voltage and is not drawing current - repeat, raising voltage by a volt of two each "cycle" till you get to just above the normal operating voltage of the cap. When I was more active in collecting/acquiring old system of indeterminate state. I built a little gadget to do this automatically - so I could leave it to do it's thing overnight. Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal