The main failure point of all old electronics are the capacitors. Over time, electrolytic capacitors dry out, and can cause a wide array of different faults. From ones that are leaky, and or way out of spec, they can exhibit all sorts of ?fun? errors in hardware. The main one i?ve come across is ?RIFA? brand rectangular thin-film filter capacitors. These can be quite violent when they fail, and they fail often. Many power supplies can be brought back (for a time) by just replacing these capacitors. Electrolytics, whilst far more reliable (and less explosive) than the RIFA capacitors, also dry out and go bad over time. However, uness your machine was built during the ?capacitor plague?, these can still be surprisingly reliable. However, if you?re planning on using the electronics regularly, they are still recommended to be replaced.The SMD electrolytics from the late 80?s and onwards often need replacing,. These can leak and rot out the leads, and being surface mount, they can be quite tricky to replace. Outside of electrolytics, tantalum capacitors can also fail. Whilst they don?t ?dry out? as such, they still degrade over time. These can fail quite spectacularly, resulting in smoke and flames if you are not careful. They are generally more reliable, and probably not worth replacing across board, but when they do fail, it can be quite impressive. Other electrical components, such as PCB?s, resistors, and silicon chips, have no discernable lifetime outside of corrosion and physical damage. Provided they are looked after, these components can carry on working indefinitely. Obviously, mechanical components (fans, relays, rotary switches), vacuum tubes, and much older cardboard tube components (resistors in vacuum tube TV?s/radios) stiff suffer from degredation from wear and old age. Often replacements can be as scarce as the equipment itself, so extra care should be taken when powering that sort of stuff on.

Speaking of problems with DEC power supplies... Some time ago I posted about problems with five 1800uF capacitors in multiple H7821 power supplies leaking electrolyte, particularly when the machines are stored in the wrong orientation. One of my MicroVAX 3100 machines has a slightly different looking H7821 power supply with a shiney case instead of the matt cases on all the other ones. The five capacitors in this one seemed to be in good shape although on closer inspection there may be slight traces of leakage on some of them. However, after running happily for five to ten minutes, it went pop with the 4A glass mains input fuse blackened. Access is difficult enough but not impossible. This PSU consists of a double sided main PCB where the high power components are and four daughter boards permanently attached at right angles to the main board and blocking easy access to many of the heatsink mounted components. There are no component references and it is difficult to trace the circuit because the tracks on the component side of the main PCB are hidden by the larger components, heatsinks etc. There was dirty black dust accumulated by the fans everywhere and it was difficult to clean off because of all the obstructions. Starting at the mains input, I tried looking for shorted capacitors, bridge rectifier, chopper transistor, diodes etc that might cause the fuse to blow but failed to find anything obviously wrong. I also looked at the output rectifiers and smoothing capacitors and found nothing obviously wrong there either. I decided to replace the fuse and try the old series light bulb trick. My 150W bulb glowed at about a fifth of it's full brilliance and the power supply seemed to function reasonably well, the green LED came on, the fans turned and the unloaded +5V and +12V outputs looked good. However the brightness of the bulb suggested too much current was being drawn. An el-cheapo digital multimeter suggested there was only 28V across the power supply mains input. A slightly better model suggested it was closer to 90V (out of 220V), however the likely wacky waveform could be confusing the meter. I left it running in this state for a little while but pulled out the mains lead when I thought I got a slight whiff of cooking electronics. It was quite difficult to quickly check that the input smoothing capacitors had discharged enough and probe various likely components with fingers to see which might be getting hot before they had time to cool down again. After a couple of attempts, I identified a MOV/varistor/surge arrestor thing in some thick heatshrink rubber stuff as a likely suspect. After unsoldering it, I found it was cracked and blackened on the underside where I couldn't see because of the heatshrink covering it. I replaced it with the equivalent one out of another H7821 which had been damaged by capacitor leakage. When I turned the power on, the bulb glowed much less, however, there were unexplained slight variations in it's brightness. While I was studying this, there was a slight cracking sound accompanied by a wisp of smoke and the bulb suddenly got much brighter. The replacement MOV thing had failed. It was connected across one of the main input smoothing capacitors, the other capacitor also having one which was unaffected. This fault was starting to look a bit familiar to me. In a different DEC power supply, I had a triac used to switch the power supply automatically between 220V and 110V mains input go short circuit causing a similarly placed MOV and fuse to fail when the unit was powered from 220V. I tried looking for a similar functioning triac in the H7821 which was not easy to do as explained. The best way to identify this component seems to be to look for a three legged high power component (which may or may not be on a heatsink - the previous one wasn't) which is more or less directly connected between the (neutral?) AC input to the bridge rectifier and the point where one end of each of the input main smoothing capacitors are connected together. Trying to follow the PCB traces was nearly impossible but buzzing out lightly suspects with a continuity tester identified a MAC220-8 mounted on the same heatsink as the main chopper device plus a temperature sensing thermistor right at the input end of the power supply as very likely to be it. It wasn't shorted which was disappointing but I decided to take it out of circuit anyway. It was necessary to unsolder the MAC220-8 and the thermistor using a solder-sucker to free the leads, unscrew the heatsink from the PCB and lean it over to one side in order to be able to unscrew the MAC220-8 from it. After soldering the thermistor back in, replacing the MOV again and powering up with the triac out, the light bulb glowed slightly for a brief period at switch on but after that there was no visible illumination while the power supply worked nicely. However, the power supply should only work on 220V with the triac missing. I extracted the same triac from the leakage damaged H7821 and compared the two devices. It turned out that the one that had caused the difficulties measured about 2.2 megaohms between MT1 and MT2 in one direction only when out of circuit while the other triac read infinity in both directions. I decided to fit the good triac into the power supply so that it would then work on either 110V or 220V as originally designed. Happily, it still worked fine after this was done. If I hadn't come across a similar fault before in a more accessible PSU, I think I would have had a very hard time tracking down this fault. Flushed with success, I moved on to look at a H7816 from a DEC 3000/600 Alphaserver. This one shows little or no signs of life except for a barely audible click at switch on. The fuse is not blown and there are no obvious signs of distress anywhere. This one is a real pig to work on. Firstly, the incoming earth connection is made to the lid of the power supply so when the lid is removed to work on it, there is no longer any earth connection to the rest of the unit. A sticker is thoughtfully placed on the underside of the lid to warn about this situation. There are also two sub-boards attached to the underside of the lid. One is a fan controller circuit (partially obscuring the sticker) which is easily removed and put out of the way. The other sub-board contains the mains input fuse, bridge rectifier, a 110V/220V autosense circuit and what seems to be either a soft start circuit or less likely, a circuit to cut the power under computer control. It is connected to the main board via a plug and socket and five leads which are only barely long enough to reach. The plug has to be removed in order to take the lid off and then 300V DC is no longer fed to the main board meaning that measurements cannot be taken on the main board to investigate what might be wrong. The real doozie is that the sub-board has a heatsink on it which is directly connected to the live side of the incoming mains for no good reason that I can see other than to make it difficult to work on. Trying to plug the sub-board back in without the lid in place would leave this live heatsink flopping onto the components mounted on the main board below. As well as all this grief, a whole bunch of low power components are mounted on another board which clipped under the main board about 10mm away from it and connected to it using three multipin plug/socket combinations denying access to the print side of the main board and the component side of the low power board whenever the unit is able to operate. There seem to be 20 Ohm load resistors across all of the outputs, making it difficult to check the output rectifiers and smoothers without desoldering stuff, in the event that the power supply turns out to be tripping due to overcurrent. On a positive note, there are component references on the boards, the minor boards are single sided, the unit is clean inside and one side is completely open allowing some access with the lid on (while keeping away from the live heatsink...) I took on this machine knowing it had a power supply fault. How hard could it be to fix it, I thought :-) I'm hoping I have an identical power supply in another machine which I can use to make comparisons to. Regards, Peter Coghlan.

On 1/11/22 10:40 AM, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote: The orange ones are usually Sprague Oxi-Caps, designed to replace Tantalum with Niobium Oxide, and they generally do NOT have the classic Tantalum issue with catastrophic failure after periods of disuse. When the do fail, they generally turn black. Some Tantalum caps were made black, some yellow. Note, the bar polarity marker is usually on the PLUS side on Tantalums and Oxi-Caps. Yes, failed decoupling caps could lead to intermittent failures. Jon

On 1/11/22 5:17 PM, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote: WOW, I don't know what those are!? They look like big ceramic caps to me, but if they don't have any polarity marking, then they can't be Tantalum.? Big multilayer ceramics are prone to cracking due to board flexing, and that can cause catastrophic failure, too. Jon

On Wed, 12 Jan 2022 at 11:02:47 -0600 Jon Elson via cctalk wrote: Thanks again Jon. They do have spikes of solder sticking out from the positive ends which can be seen in the picture. There are no circuit references on the I/O board where the picture was taken. However there are markings on the system board including little + signs at the same ends as the solder spikes on similar capacitors on that board. I managed to desolder one of them from the middle of the picture using two soldering irons. I am not very good at this surface mount stuff :-( It came out ok though. I must have got lucky and picked a good one because it measured 47uF on the capacitance range on my multimeter. Regards, Peter.

On Wed, 12 Jan 2022 at 17:28:33 -0600 Richard Schauer via cctalk wrote: This stuff dates from around 1994 I think. My 47uF component is about 6 or 7mm x 3 or 4mm. Maybe a problem with squeezing a lot of capacitance in could be that it wants to pop out again! I probably need to peer closely at all of mine and figure out how many I need. There are about 50 of these things in each of three machines :-( The hot tweezer sounds very nice but I think I'll stick with what I have for now. These machines have other problems and won't ever do anything useful unless I get the cache issues sorted out so I don't necessarily want to invest in new tools for them to end up not getting them repaired. Many thanks. Regards, Peter.

On Jan 12, 2022, at 11:23 PM, Rob Jarratt via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Purchasing *good* tools is a key thing. A good tool is an investment, a cheap tool is often a waste of money (there are always exceptions). Zane

On Wed, 12 Jan 2022, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote: They do look like tantalum caps to me, e.g.: <https://www.mouser.co.uk/ProductDetail/74-595D106X9025C2T> The pointed end indicates polarity. Maciej

Thanks Eugene. Perhaps I should have more clearly stated that whatever short was there cleared itself pretty much as soon as it happened, leaving no evidence of where it it had been and nothing to go on to locate it. There is no sign of anything getting hot afterwards. The machine still seems to work as well as it did before the failure so it seems unlikely it was an active component or a component in series with a power rail that failed. I have seen a non-surface mounted tantalum bead capacitor short in an ADM-5 terminal. It produced not much noise, lots of smoke pouring out of it and a little black hole in the top of it as far as I recall, a bit like a Rifa capacitor failing in fact. On another occasion I had one explode violently with a very loud bang leaving nothing but the leads sticking out of the board in some other machine that I don't recall the name of. This particular incident was somewhere between the two above. It was not very loud or violent but it was over very quickly indeed and I can't find what happened. Regards, Peter. W2HX wrote: