Beware your parts

[Mylithra]

These were suppose to be axial leaded. Make sure you use reputable parts from reputable manufactures. I dont fault my supplier for these but this kind of "Tatctic" thats probably responsible for so much of the crap out there today. Also, I know I can sub parts and values within reason and it certainly seems like 16uf to 22uf would be in reason but let me make that decision. As far as voltage is concerned, I applied 420v to this cap and the brown one had a little bubble on it.
Just fair warning if you've used these.

[mexicola]

i'm not sure what you're trying to say.
so you applied 420V to a 400V rated cap and it failed?
yeah, no surprise there.
Nichicon makes great caps, particularly the HE series. I use them all the time. They're great if you use them within their specified voltage rating.

and what the heck happened to those elon caps? it looks like they 'sploded!

[Mylithra]

Um.. no. The 22uf 400vs were re-wrapped in the 20uf 500v shrink, then had longer leads soldered to it and stuffed into the axial can marked 16uf 450v. I took them apart when one failed.
So yeah.. its toast.

[JohnRoberts]

I'm not surprised. Axial caps have fallen out of favor in modern manufacturing for decades. I recall being told by a US cap manufacturer when I worked at Peavey that we were the or one of the largest remaining customers for axial caps. This was some 15-20 years ago and we were quickly engineering them out.

Radial caps are cheaper and take up less PCB real estate.

Trust but verify.. even back then there were lots of small cap companies. Anybody who can order up some custom shrink wrap can rebrand caps. Another popular mistakes from those guys, is getting the polarity wrong.

JR

[triez]

A local tube hi-fi amp importer here told me last year that he is seeing a disturbing trend from China in electronics - as the price of copper is rising, Chinese manufacturers are winding their various inductors with aluminium wire instead of copper, and once the brown lacquer is put over the top it looks identical.

[JohnRoberts]

Trust but verify..

At my old day job, when we were qualifying new (lower cost) vendors for parts in large scale production. We would first test a handful of samples in engineering. If they checked out, we would then run a thousand or two in a short production run in the factory, to confirm that the engineering samples weren't ringers.

More than once the production sample failed miserably. This was a couple decades ago, so nothing new.

JR

[dcollins]

Originally Posted by JohnRoberts

Trust but verify..

I had a bunch of 1N914's with the cathode marked on the wrong end. Not good.


DC

[David Kulka]

In the last year, of about 1000 orders of all kinds, I've had 2 parts problems:

50 supposedly NOS Motorola transistors from a Chinese supplier that were obvious fakes, way too new looking and only 4 or 5 of them worked. Seller sent a refund without much hassle.

"New" Aromat relays with HIGHLY resistive contacts (100 ohms, 15k), totally unusable. From a So Cal online vendor, bad cust svc, am fighting them now.

The other 998 buys went smoothly. thumbsup (Actually, it's amazing how fast and efficient parts buying is, these days.)