The electrolytic cans have all been restuffed and are back in place on the chassis. No visible sign that they've been touched:
Today I did most of the paper cap restuffing. Here's the starting point -- a new yellow cap and the old cap it needs to end up inside:
OK, I realize 0.22 uF is not quite exactly the same as 0.25 uF, but it does work very nicely in the set, so this is close enough.
I started by heating the caps a few at a time in the kitchen oven at 300 F for 15 minutes. This melts the sealing wax at the ends of the caps so that the old cap innards can be pushed out one end:
Although the wax coating on the outside of the capacitor melts at a much lower temperature, the sealing wax needs to get pretty hot to melt. Unfortunately, this means that the coating wax is pretty much lost. I'll coat them with new wax at the end of the process.
Once the cardboard tube is clean, I clamp the new capacitors upright in a vise, and stand the cardboard tubes up around them so they are ready to be filled with hot melt glue:
I squirt enough glue in to fill the end. I find it looks better if I reflow the glue with a heat gun after I am done dispensing with the hot glue gun. Sometimes it settles a bit and more has to be added.
I had two colors of hot glue sticks -- neither of which is ideal. I started with some light amber sticks, but decided it comes out too light colored. The other option I have is brown, which is darker than ideal, but I decided I like it better than the light amber. After wax coating, maybe these will resemble the originals.
Take a look yourself and see which color you like better:
Here's all the paper caps in their current state:
Tomorrow if I have time I will coat all of them with a fresh coating of beeswax. The slightly cloudy color of the beeswax should help them look a bit more like the originals. Right now, they are "too clean."
I'll post some more pictures after the wax coating.