Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisW6ATV
Most of the wax capacitors were replaced, many as long ago as the 1960s based on likely date codes on the replacement caps, but those early replacements are "maroon beauties" (maroon-colored molded caps with the leads out the middle of each end, as opposed to "drop"-type radial dipped capacitors). . . . . . . . .
What do you all think about those "maroon beauties"-are they likely good since they're from the 1960s or newer, or should I replace them now?
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Chris,
If the pictures of the "maroon beauties" shown in the bottom image in post 28 above are what you are talking about, then there are two answers.
If the replacement capacitors are genuine Sprague, they probably are OK but are nearing the end of their natural life.
However in about 1957-1959, there were a lot of counterfeit Spragues made that mostly failed within a few weeks. The best clue as to whether it is a genuine or counterfeit, is how level the yellow ink is. The counterfeits were marked with a rubber stamp by hand, while the genuine Spragues were machine labeled. Another clue is the fakes usually had a little more plastic extruded around the axel leads than the genuine.
During this time, the nationally known wholesale house where we bought our parts was fooled and sold these as a lower cost alternative. We were low on several popular values and bought a single order. After we had had three failures in 6 weeks, we brought these back to the wholesaler and demanded and got our money back, along with replacement genuine Sprague capacitors. We notified every customer who's set had used capacitors and had been repaired during this time frame and did a free inspection in home. On radios, the customer had to bring them back and we inspected those while they waited.
Apparently when Sprague made it too hot for the counterfeiter to sell these, they made the identical capacitors in several plastic colors with other fake labels. Most had either white or yellow ink, although I've seen a couple of ones with green and red ink. I've seen them labeled as Admiral, RCA, Motorola, Tung-sol, (yes, Tung-sol !!) and a other known and fake brands. They were often advertised in magazines and sold as major brand production over-runs, or manufacturer end-of-model-run surplus, even into the mid-1960's.
The radio bench made a 100% switch to the counterfeit parts, as we were out, while the TV bench just added them to their working stock. Many of the TV's that we pulled apart in the customer's home, on a large shop cloth, to check did
not actually have one of the counterfeits in it.
Trust me, after this incident, the shop that I worked for started keeping a much more detailed component record attached to our file copy of the bill.
James