Hit 5,000 capacitor replacements on old power supplies and never expected to care that much

I was just keeping count for fun but when I hit 5,000 last Tuesday it actually felt like a real milestone, has anyone else tracked a weird number like that just out of curiosity?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_jenny8d ago

I hit 500 recaps on my bench last year and it felt way bigger than I expected too. I started counting just to see how many old Dell Optiplex boards I could save from the e-waste pile. Somewhere around 300 I realized I had a whole drawer full of dead caps that looked just like the ones I pulled out of my first fix. Now I could probably name the bad brands just by looking at the bulge pattern.

jackson.wesley8d ago

My first thought is that maybe counting just keeps you from actually fixing stuff. I hit 200 recaps last month and by that point I was more focused on the tally than on whether the board was actually gonna work long term. The quality drops off when you're just chasing numbers, which is why I tell people to slow down. @the_jenny might disagree, but I bet a lot of those 500 Optiplex boards could have had a bad joint or two that got missed because the counter was going up. To me, hitting a big number just means you've got a lot of practice, not that you're doing the work right.