Date   : Sun, 02 Sep 2007 03:19:14 +0100
From   : zeem.uk@... (Alex Taylor)
Subject: Power Supply Problem

On 01/09/07, Philip Pemberton <philpem@...> wrote:
> Chris Priest wrote:
> > One of my beebs has blown 2 PSU's in the past two days, when I say
> > blown, there was a pop and smoke from the PSU, yet it still continues to
> > work!

I've had 6 or 7 Beebs blow like this (and an Apple IIe and a
Triumph-Adler Alphatronic PC), and yes, they continue to work fine. As
far as I know, they tend to blow when they've not been powered up for
a very long time, after which they dry out, and the sudden application
of power makes them explode quite violently.

As others have stated, it's just a mains filter capacitor. And yes,
the gunk can smell quite badly afterwards, one of my PSUs I had to
scrub with industrial detergent and then dry it out, and it still
smells a bit.

I bought a few replacement caps from Maplins, they're not very
expensive to buy and they're very easy to replace. I've also got a few
suitable caps that I salvaged from dead VGA monitors.

-- 
Alex Taylor