5 Feb
2004
5 Feb
'04
6:04 p.m.
On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, CRC wrote:
> To safely re-energize a piece of equipment that is long in the tooth
> and has been sitting around for some time, you have to bring the
> voltage up relatively slowly to allow the electrolytic caps to
> re-polarize. Everyone who is collecting should own a good-sized Variac.
> You power the box up by bringing the voltage from naught to the
> operational level with the Variac over a period of about a second or
Then duck! IMHO opinion, and over 40+ years experience, to reform
funky caps takes anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour, depending on
many variables. If you think you've formed an electrolytic in one second,
it was either tiny or good-to-begin-with.
But the thing most folks forget is to somehow monitor the *current*
being drawn during the Process of Reformation.
Here endeth the Lesson.
One second? I've always been told to do this over the course of at least
a couple hours in 5V increments.
Again - it depends on the voltage/capacity of the filters involved, and
just how "bad" gthey are. One simply cannot place an arbitrary
voltage/time delta on all power supplies.
The Ammeter (or it's analog) is here your friend.
Cheers
John