RCA 621TS restoration -- in pictures

[Tom Albrecht]

Some pictures of restuffing electrolytic cans:

There are five cans with black sleeves on them. These are easier to do, since the final replacement of the black sleeve will cover up the way I cut the can. For this method, I don't even need to remove the cap from its mounting. The wires to the negative terminals (can) have not been disturbed.

First, I pulled off the black sleeve. Fortunately on these, no heat is needed -- just a good pull and it comes off. Sometimes a bit of heat is needed to get the adhesive to let go, but in this case not. I then removed nearby items on top of the chassis, so I can get a Dremel tool in there to cut around the circumference of the can, about half way up:



After pulling the can apart, the guts come out easily:



For this cap, the replacements are tiny compared to the originals, so room is not an issue:



The top is put back on the can and taped with Gorilla tape:



The sleeve then goes back on. There is enough friction on this one that no adhesive is needed:



One of the can caps doesn't have a black sleeve. To keep the final appearance the same as the original, I won't cut the can in the middle. Often I see people uncrimp the bottom of the can, but this can leave the bottom of the can a little ratty looking. So I'm going to elect to slice off the crimp at the very bottom so I can remove things from the bottom without affecting the appearance of the can from the top at all. For this operation, the can is completely removed from the chassis:



I used a Dremel tool to carefully cut around the lip on the bottom of the can. I cut from the bottom, not from the side:



As you can see, a little ring of aluminum (which I discarded) comes off when I do this. Next, the ring with the tabs is removed:



The wafer with the lugs is pulled out. Next comes the job of getting the innards out. This turned out to be a little bit of a challenge. I heated the whole works with a heat gun to soften the tar. However, it was tricky to grab the innards in any way to pull them out. Finally I came up with the idea of driving a screw into the center and pulling on the screw:



Unlike the first cap mentioned above, fitting the new caps into this one (with four sections) was not easy. Most of the caps I had were too large. I finally found a combination that would fit. For the 20 uF section, I ended up using two 10 uF in parallel, since the 20 uF cap I had available was too large in diameter:



Everything was reassembled, and I used a little bead of JB Weld to hold everything together:



The bead of epoxy won't be visible after the cap is mounted back in the set. This is obviously not as strong as the original, but as long as no one uses the cap as a handle to pick up the chassis, it should be OK.

A few more electrolytic cans to go, and then the paper caps will have their turn.