I know about matching caps. I did product and industrial photography for years and had some big strobe packs. When the caps in those strobe packs blew it was like a firecracker going off. When one cap blew I would buy eight new caps and insist they were all from the same mfg lot. Even then you had to make sure they were fully formed before you put them in the circuit. If you did not have them in an identical state the weak one would blow taking the diode bridge with it. I forget how many diodes were in the bridge but they were all cast into one long strip so you could not just replace the ones that blew. It was bad enough that I bought a Sencore capacitor analyzer. Ascor eventually went out of business and I still wanted to use the 2400ws packs for location work so I had to find solutions to the problems the packs had. I made my own diode bridges so I could replace bad diodes and not toss the entire bridge. Eventually I switched to 500v Cornell caps from the 360v Siemens. Ascor was trying to keep their strobe packs light and cram as much power into them as possible so they ran the caps with very little headroom, at 330v and it was just to hot. They had a good charge circuit and I was able to turn the regulator up to 400v when I switched to the Cornell caps and though they were only 2400uf vs the 2600 for the Siemens total power went up. After I put the Cornell caps in those packs I never had to rebuild them again. Which I was very happy about as they are a scary beast to work on. A question about the 330uf cap on the 5v PS2 boards. Are you able to get the old cap. out and a new one in without separating the boards ? I was thinking about crushing the can and see if I could pop the end off the can. I like to be able to remove the leads from the board one at the time rather than heat both at the same time. j
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