[hopeless]

I'm talking of wet electrolyte caps.

The leads seem not to tolerate the same stress of those of film caps, and that's fine with me.

But how susceptible to damage caused by stress are they? For instance a little pulling/pushing of the leads, or a little twisting. Please enlighten me - thanks

I've made experiments with spare (quality) electrolytics, and it seems that when the cap is not mounted on a pcb, by both pulling and twisting the leads repeatedly with your bare hands

you end up breaking the lead sooner than pulling the whole armature out of the cap. Is that just as reassuring as it would look?!?

Obviously what I'm concerned with is the perfect integrity of the cap (in normal DIY action environments, not in dummy tests like above), not simply if it still works without notable degradation in performance.

 

[hopeless]

Any clue or hint? I feel that I'm a bit paranoiac about the issue.

 

[cfcubed]

The only time I worry is when pulling electrolytics from a PCB but intend on re-using them... A couple times early on when doing this leads have come out. Now I do this very carefully & compare the pulled cap lead lengths to make sure they are the same. Can always confirm lead connectivity using an ohmmeter. Toss any questionable ones.

From opening several commercial products seems the "better" ones tack down (w/glue that can be cut) all but the smallest electrolytics... Perhaps for all the shipping they see.

 

[hopeless]

Thanks for the info. I wouldn't even consider re-using a cap whose integrity I suspect nowadays

The times when I took nice low ESR Panasonic caps from a video recorder and used them for upgrading my Cambridge Audio CD player are gone now. Adventurous times they were.