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Serious question, did anyone else's grandpa's tube radio caps just fail out of nowhere after 40 years?
Last Thursday in my garage in Tucson, I flipped on my grandpa's old Zenith console radio like I do most evenings and got nothing but hum. That set ran fine for 40 years, and I mean every single night, until it didn't. I pulled the chassis and two wax caps had split right down the side, along with one resistor reading way off spec. A guy at the electronics swap meet on Saturday told me old caps dry out whether you use the radio or not, so sitting pretty doesn't save them. Thing is, I still run it because that warm glow beats any speaker I own. So do you guys swap every cap at once, or just replace the dead ones and hope the rest hold on?
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shane_hayes23d ago
Ah yes, the classic "worked fine for four decades and then died the second you touched it" trick. Old paper and wax caps don't care if the radio sits or runs, they just dry up and rot from the inside out, so replacing only the two that split is like fixing two boards on a rotten deck. Every one of those caps is the same age and same junk, so you'll be pulling the chassis again next month when the next one lets go. Swap them all at once, it's cheaper than a new output transformer when a shorted cap takes it out.
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