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Old 02-16-2024, 08:51 PM
dinorhino dinorhino is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2023
Posts: 5
Update: I disassembled the whole thing, gave everything but the tube a generous bath with 99% IPA and a paint brush. Cleaned up really nice, and there is no sign of any blown up components. It must have lived in a really dirty environment.

Upon initial inspection there are no leaky caps surprisingly. There's some differences in my unit from the pics HelloVoltage posted. Board B has conformal coating surrounding the pins on the IC's and capacitors, and I suspect that's hiding some cap leakage, but thankfully it protected the traces.

A few days after washing it I'm starting to smell something fishy (electrolyte) so I will be replacing most of the caps. I tested all of them with my ESR meter and most of them are shot or close to the limit. The giant caps on board D1 are testing as good so I might keep those if they aren't leaking.

Does anyone know if I should bother replacing all the really tiny bipolar electrolytic caps? I don't really know how to identify the value, some just say "10" and some say nothing at all. My ESR meter can't read them either because they are too small, it just shows open circuit. In my experience these never really leak or go bad but I'm curious to what you guys will say.

Last night I made a list of all the caps, minus those tiny ones. I'll post it later once I confirm there's no mistakes.

I'm also gonna pop open the diversity unit again and test all the caps even though they look fine.

I'm always so impressed by the quality and engineering of these early 90s electronics, It seems like it was a time where they had to try really hard to fit things into a small package with mostly through-hole components. The smell of electronics from the late 80s-early 90's is heavenly, its definitely a unique to that time period. The PCBs are usually a much darker green and are always covered in lots of flux.

Next update I'll try powering it on with the new caps.
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