The PHILCO Phorum

I am rebuilding the capacitor block in a model 95
do these need to be electrolytic for the rebuild?

Simplex! Welcome! Great to see you've finally joined us. Took you long enough!

The yellow foil capacitors should have a longer life than any electrolytic; I would use those. I have used electrolytics in those cans previously, but I plan to use yellow film henceforth. Since the values are not real huge (typically 1 and 2.2 uF), they should be manageable. In other words, plenty of room for them in that big can.

Thanks for the welcome. I figured I could but wanted to make sure.

Well, good luck with that. And don't be a stranger, drop in anytime.

Some guys, like Bob Anderson on his 115DX, are substituting film capacitors for the wet electrolytics that his set originally came with. Since the originals were only something like 8 uf each it isn't too hard to string a bunch of non polarized caps together in parallel. I am planning on doing this with a Marconi type 12 that had a capacitor block with a bunch of 1 and 2 uf caps with an 8 uf amongst them.
Regards
Arran

Nothing sacred about electrolytics in power supply filtering.

Back in the days, larger value capacitors (condensers) were not practical to make, until the electrolyte technology matured a bit to have a large capacitance value in a reasonable form factor, as opposed to gigantic wax-paper caps to get same capacitance. Electrolytic chemistry is polarized and one must adhere to the (+) and (-) for the chemistry to work correctly. Today's non-polar metal-film types will work the same without special hookups.

...and now back to your regularly scheduled program...

Chuck