Uncle!!

[veg-o-matic]

Okay, I give up. Apparently, I'm just too stupid for this sort of thing. Pardon me while I rant.

So I got my 50 bucks worth of electrolytic caps from Moyer and tried installing them in my Zenith roundie (Laura, for those of you who remember.)

How the h-e-double toothpicks are you supposed to do this? After a couple of hours, I managed to replace about three of them. The ones I could find and get at. Finally gave up in frustration.

F'rinstance: C1 is just a single cap, not one of those multi ones. It's in a cardboard tube and it's riveted to the chassis. Look at the underside and what I find is ONE terminal tab. Where's the other one? Is that it, buried under a blob of silicone? Scraped enough of the goo off to jumper across it and it didn't do any good. Foo.

Moving right along, I try number 3 or 4, I forget which. They're the multi-caps in cans. Locate the tabs under the chassis. But what gets connected to what? Not wanting to blow up the house, I skip those, too.

Studying the schematic, I see that one of the lytics gets connected to a red/yellow wire, apparently coming off the transformer. Well, that should be straightforward. Except all the wires are black! Maybe there's a color underneath. Try rubbing the wires with nail polish remover; no good. Try scraping them with a razor knife. Didn't do squat either.

Arrrrrgggggghhhhh!

How do you guys do it? Everyone makes it sound so simple--"Pulled the chassis and replaced the 'lytics last night. Some of the gb6's were off spec, so I did those too. And one of the gronkulators was grounding to the frammis coil, so I adjusted the spark gap and then reamed out the phlegmster as well..."

Again, arrrrrrggggghhhhh!

And just so you know I'm not totally helpless, in the past week I redid the floor in my bathroom (including removing and replacing the terlet), fixed the motor on my stereo, and even made slipcovers for the chairs in my den.

Sorry for the rant. Just frustrated. Frankly, I think I need to up my dosage...

veg