Re: Amiga A1200 recapping
I'm not a fan of recapping in general, preferring to trace and repair actual faults. However, in a piece of equipment which makes extensive use of surface-mounted electrolytics, I'd change that view. They are absolutely awful components and not only do they fail themselves but they routinely leak corrosive stuff that destroys the PCB around them. I have an Apple Macintosh SE/30 here which needed every single one of the surface mount electrolytics replacing. They really were all faulty, in such a way as to stop the machine working and damage to the PCB was already starting.
When replacing them I used either ceramic capacitors where the circuit function allowed it, or wire-ended electrolytics tidily fitted to the original pads where the function or component value didn't permit a ceramic.
That era of electronics, from the late 1980s to the mid 2000s, used a lot of these things and they're all going to fail. They exist only to keep costs down, as far as I can see. Even today when designing electronics professionally I refuse to specify surface-mounted can-type electrolytics, and try to use a different capacitor type or through-hole electrolytic.
Chris
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