Another R-22 heat pump update

A little looking on the web found the cap for $5.30, I bet I pay $40 locally! Also, it has a "Physical interrupter for safety". I never heard of that in a cap.

Government speak for a fuse? Art

sort of- the idea is if the cap overheats and the can lid swells outwards the leads rip out of the cap and it disconnects.

That only shows that it has some capacitance, not that it is good. Some run capacitors are non polarized electrolytics which slowly dry out, and their capacitance drops.

When in doubt, replace!

When in doubt, troubleshoot and do a proper repair.

Whatever, but I prefer to know wht really failed rather than throw parts at a problem. In electronic repair that is called Shot gunning. Most of the techs at my last job worked that way. I found the problem and fixed it. I did three to seven times their work each day, by doing it my way and used about 5% of the parts.

When I was a tech at the amusement machine place (everything from foosball tables to jukeboxes to pinballs to video games; electronic darts were particularly annoying to fix; the board itself would wear out from being hit by darts), doing video game boards, it was usually quicker and cheaper at 19 cents a chip to just shotgun it rather than dick around with it at a shop rate of $30.00/hour.

They had a big sign on the shop wall:

"Shop rates: $30.00/hour $40.00/hour if you watch $60.00/hour if you help $90.00/hour if your kid helps"

;-)

Cheers! Rich

That's because you really, really know your shit! I only know enough to shotgun new parts in until it works.

I didn't start out knowing, but I was determined to become the best electronics tech that I could. I started mowing lawns at 12 to buy tools and test equipment and read used college EE textbooks while other kids were buying comic books and candy. :)

I will admit that I had 'The Knack' for electronics as a kid, and sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and know exactly how to fix a problem that had eluded me during the day. I worked with some who bragged about all the years the spent in school, but I spent those years doing the work. One could tell you exactly how something was SUPPOSED to work, but was absolutely useless in the shop. He laid a hot soldering iron on a large piece of those old 'Excelsior' recycled paper packing material and started a fire in the shop. He was screaming, "Run for you life" and standing right in front of the extinguisher. I grabbed the burning paper and other stuff and ran out the front door and tossed it into the parking lot and waited for it to burn out. He was still standing in the same spot, and shaking like a leaf wen I went back in, ten minutes later. That was his last day, when the owner found out what happened. He was working for RCA the last time I saw him, and was told that he was designing TV tuners. That was before they shut down their consumer products division, because they had so many bad designs.

"Michael A. Terrell" fired this volley in news:P-adnXHg-LRusV7QnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

I have to disagree with that. I ran a maintenance depot for a large regional computer firm. ANY day, give me a tech who understands electronic theory (even without any technical "hands-on" experience) over one who has _only_ had field experience.

With the first, I can train, teach, coax, and even coerce practical knowlege into, and the process will involve epiphanies of recognition as he/she ties the theoretical into the practical.

Almost all of the "hands-on-only" techs I've hired were reasonably competent, perfectly capable of fixing almost everything they'd ever seen before, and worth their salt in the field -- but few could "make the leap" intellectually between a new problem, and the reason it existed or the method to solve it.

I, too, learned electronics starting at age ten, when I joined "The American Basic Science Club" through an ad in Popular Science. I started out "hands-on", but got the formal training, too. I even taught my Dad enough about it that HE went to electronics school, ended up teaching there eventually, and he and I opened a TV/Radio repair business (back in the day when they were both repairable and worth repairing).

But no... give me a tech who understands theory every time over one who does not.

LLoyd

You're welcome to them. I had better luck teaching the second group, because the degreed types were insulted that someone dared tell them how something worked, or how to fix it. The first step in teaching is having a student who wants to learn. If you don't have that they aren't going to learn anything useful.

I was working in a TV shop at 13, even though I still had a lot to learn. I was still able to diagnose most problems without help, but a few times I needed help to find a simpler way to do the actual repair. For instance, I was taught to remove the PC board from the early Delco AM solid state radios and use a bunch of jumpers to reconnect the coils in the tuner to the board. that took an extra 10 minutes per radio, and quite often the terminals on the coils would break while being deoldered. I quickly discovered that a pair of curved hemostats would let me put a new part into the proper holes under the cast aluminum body, even though you couldn't see anything. I was able to fix most of them in little more time than it took to remove the covers. I kept several full sets of Delco transistors at my bench, but the two most common failures were the RF and the mixer transistors. Rarely did it take me more than five minutes to fix one.

When i was drafted I took the MOS test for Broadcast Engineer and got the highest score on record. I tested out of the three year school, and went straight to permanent duty.

BTW, most color TVs still had round CRTS like the 25JP22 when I started, and the 23EGP22 was just hitting the market. It was one of the worst color CRTs ever made. I moved into broadcast engineering, and later into electronics manufacturing without any formal education in electronics but I so many of the mistakes in the pre production samples that became part of my job. They knew up front that I would tell them where they screwed up, and what I felt they should do to fix the problems. They rarely argued with my remarks. They also asked why I didn't have an EE degree, since I was able to analyze and fix just about anything and often with no schematics.

"Michael A. Terrell" fired this volley in news:EsOdnZ0-8eCkp17QnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

I'm not talking about "degrees". I wouldn't hire a BSEE for that job. I'm talking about technical school graduates who had some actual theory under their belts.

BSEEs are in their own little world. MSEEs on another planet, and PhDEEs in another dimension (not that I don't appreciate the work they do... that's what keeps us "grunts" working)

LLoyd

The best EEs I worked with either had a ham license and built or repaired their equipment, or they worked with electronics as a kid.

"Michael A. Terrell" fired this volley in news:OJGdnWbB-NhtxV7QnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

de WA4ZEG

Lloyd

I built a radio at eight years old, and was designing my own HF rig from scratch when I was drafted. People would shake their heads when they saw the chassis. It was completely modular so I could build new modules to test different circuits, and it had a lot of pin jacks with a