[R-390] Electrolytic Caps

[Norm n3ykf]

General purpouse cap assortments can be bought from this dude. (or
mouser or digikey).

vakits.com VA is the owner, new ham after 30 years in the electronics buisiness.

 He's got a bunch of kits that work for general building. SMT or
discrete. Reasonable prices.

Oddball stuff of course from the big vendors.

Norm pz5yk (for a few more days..)

On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 7:35 PM, Charles Steinmetz
<csteinmetz at yandex.com> wrote:
> Blair wrote:
>
>> I'd like to buy an inventory of Electrolytic Caps, and kits can be quite
>> inexpensive from China via eBay. Are all brands dependable?
>
>
> No, not at all.  And it's not just brands, it's also individual product
> lines within each brand.  China, Inc. makes a huge variety of electrolytic
> capacitors, from unmitigated junk to space-qualified parts.  You, or someone
> acting on your behalf, has to navigate this swamp and figure out which are
> which, and how to get what you need.  The ones that sell in small quantities
> for next to nothing on ebay or from far east exporters are the unmitigated
> junk.
>
> Above, I'm talking about capacitors that are marketed honestly by the
> manufacturers (but NOT NECESSARILY by the middlemen between you and the
> manufacturers) as exactly what they are.  In addition to those, there are
> the outright counterfeits -- capacitors, invariably from the unmitigated
> junk catagory, packaged as products from reputable product lines, but that
> in fact have nothing to do with the brands and lines they appear to be from.
>
> Sadly, counterfeiting of electrolytic capacitors is so rampant that even
> major distributors are victimized by the practice.  But at least if you buy
> from a major distributor, you can expect to get a recall notice when the
> distributor finds out it has 20 million bogus capacitors in stock (this
> happens reasonably quickly because the caps get sold to hundreds of
> companies, many of which qualify incoming parts and will discover the
> problem sooner than later).
>
> We have gotten such notices from most of the major distributors, and it
> seems to affect about 2-5% of the (combined) major distributors' inventory
> (that's a WAG based on our own recalled orders and conversations with other
> users and distributors' sales engineers).  It is enough of a problem that
> savvy manufacturers have learned to buy 'lytics well in advance, so they are
> still sitting on the shelf when they get the recall notice -- not installed
> in products that would then need to be recalled.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Charles
>
>
>
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