[Chris Drumma]

I would like to order some silver mica caps. Any ideas on what are the most popular sizes for pre-war Philcos so I do not buy unneeded ones.
thanks
Chris

[Carl Travis]

Hi Chris,
I was thinking along those lines myself, except I wanted to order a general selection for most of the radios I work on.
I looked at the assortment Justradios sells, but it seems to have a lot of values that would seldom be used and not enough of the more common values.

[Chris Drumma]

Carl,
My thoughts exactly. I wish that they had a silver mica pre-war kit like they do with the capacitors. Anybody have any ideas?
thanks
Chris

[Poston Drake]

HI Chris,

For a number of years I tried to keep a reasonable stock of mica caps, but usually never had exactly what I needed. One of the best things I ever did a few years ago was to buy a mica cap kit from Dave Cantelon at http://www.justradios.com

Here is the link to the kit which he offers:
http://www.justradios.com/capkits.html#kit11

Kit #10 features 140 silver mica caps in 39 different values, and should cover anything you will ever need for a Philco or any other radio. Price is $69.99 (free shipping) but is money well spent in my opinion. Once you have the initial kit you can monitor which particular values you use the most often and order individual replacements at a very low cost.

While it might seem that you will never use some of the mmfd values included in this kit, you might be surprised at how handy it is to have these when/if you need them. Remember, when replacing a silver mica cap the original specs should be used as a guide but in certain critical circuits these might not always work properly. Having the full selection of mica cap values to choose from allows you to pick a cap maybe 5 or 10 mmfd above or below the original value which is sometimes what is needed to make things work. Also, when replacing mica caps inside IF transformers quite often the service data will not tell you what the original value was. With a full assortment of mica cap values you can experiment by trial-and-error to find the value which works best.

The relatively high initial price of $69.99 for Dave's kit should be considered as a one-time investment. After that, you can keep your kit fully stocked in years to come at a relatively low cost, based upon which values you use up.

Poston