23 Feb
2009
23 Feb
'09
9:22 a.m.
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 6:42 AM, Christian Corti
<cc at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote:
On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
Apparently I don't have a picture of it, but my first motherboard died
after a year or so when I was away for a couple days. I came home to
find it powered off; my parents (I was in high school at the time)
said they heard a bang so they hit the surge protector switch. When I
cracked open the case, one of my motherboard electrolytics had blasted
the can right off of itself. The can was laying on the bottom of the
case and there was a pretty spiral of paper hanging from the base of
the cap! The can was pinched at the middle, like somebody grabbed it
with a pair of needle-nose pliers.
Luckily, that has not happened again.
John
--
"I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS
reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C,
Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey." -- Ted Dziuba
This is the only popped electrolytic I have ever seen, in damn near 30
years of fiddling with electronic stuff:
http://www.gjcp.net/~gordonjcp/blowncap.jpg
I do have tons of such caps, mostly from modern PC mainboards, ATX power
supplies and graphics cards. This is *very* common today due to the high
frequency and high current nature of the designs.
Christian
