Solar CB-1-60 capacitor analyzer

[bandersen]

I picked this unit up a few years ago and it seemed to work OK as-is. The eye tube would reach maximum deflection in the right ballpark and the neon bulb would flash for leaky caps.


Recently while working on a TV, I decided to troubleshoot it the "old fashioned way" by checking all the caps with this device. First though I figured I better give it an overhaul.

I'm glad I did - it works much, much better now. The eye response is sharper and the dial is more accurate.

Here's a link to the manual courtesy of the "boat anchor archive".

The schematic is at the back, but there's one little problem - no parts values are stated!
After a lot of digging, I finally found it in this old ARF thread


There are three precision caps specified - 2.0, 0.02 and 0.5 mfd.
I doubled up two 5% 1.0 for the 2.0 and used a 0.47 for the 0.5 mfd.
Luckily, I did have a 5% mica 0.02 mfd on hand.

The other tricky part is the 36,000 ohm tapped voltage divider. If yours is bad, I imagine you could fabricate a new one using discrete parts, but you'll need to know the correct values.

Here are some pictures of the insides. Note that mine has been modified to use a 6X5 rather than a I-V rectifier.