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My Worst Troubleshooting Experience!

🕑 Added 2017-02-23 02:27:19 +0000 UTC

Comments

John

I know the electrolyte in many electrolytic capacitors can smell pretty bad, especially if the capacitor overheats and the electrolyte oozes out of the condenser. (yes, I do sometimes call capacitors by their old name "condensers".) . But there is a component that smells far far worst than capacitor electrolyte. I am speaking of the infamous old school selenium rectifier which is sometimes still encountered in old equipment that has not been rebuilt or restored. One afternoon I was troubleshooting an old tube type portable radio from the 1940s. It was designed to run off of batteries but it also included an AC line cord so that you could run it off standard household 110 VAC current. In order to convert the AC into DC they utilized a selenium rectifier. In any event I had the radio plugged into 110 VAC and I was probing around the chassis with my multimeter and suddenly, at one point I caught a whiff of the most horrible stench I had ever encountered. I thought a rat or some animal got inside and died under or in back of the bench so I started looking around. It was then I happened to notice a trace of smoke coming from the radio chassis and I immediately disconnected it. Sure enough the smoke was coming from the old selenium rectifier which was very hot. The horrid stench was Hydrogen Selenide, a putrid and highly toxic gas driven off from the overheated selenium rectifier. I wound up disconnecting and replacing the selenium rectifiers with modern silicone diodes but I did leave the old selenium rectifier in the radio for nostalgic appearance.

Allan Gabston-Howell

I've often thought that I would collect vintage parts and components, or those really rare components for niche applications, that you almost never see; but what I have discovered is that I collect components which have given me the most grief isolating as the intermittently failing culprit for so much s\customer upset out in the field. However, each one is actually representative of a success story in my personal history with electronics, and a reminder that there are more of those kinds of landmines out there, waiting to catch me when my mind is wandering.

Don

Good

Daniel Bingamon

A friend of mine had a Cincinnati Milacron CNC that wouldn't start, it was in a damp building and there was a certain spot on the power supply board that I could put a hair dryer on it for a few seconds and it would start right up.