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Mechanically aligning old variable caps?
I have a fair number of medium-sized (i.e. big enough for a 100-watt
amp or antenna tuner) variable caps that have one problem: The spacing of the rotor does not match the spacing of the stator. I can line up the front end to be nicely spaced, but then the back end is too close. Or I can do the back end, and the front end is too close. I can compromise by choosing a point halfway between the two alignments, but: Were these old capacitors (many of them from the 20's and 30's) really so poorly constructed that the rotor spacing did not match the stator spacing? Or is there some long-term "swelling" of the metal parts that results in this misalignment? I could correct the slightly-off spacing by pulling out the spacers on the rotor and grinding them down just a little bit each (literally, just a thousandth would be too much), but I think there must be something more fundamental that I'm missing :-). Tim. |
#2
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Mechanically aligning old variable caps?
wrote in message ps.com... I have a fair number of medium-sized (i.e. big enough for a 100-watt amp or antenna tuner) variable caps that have one problem: Were these old capacitors (many of them from the 20's and 30's) really so poorly constructed that the rotor spacing did not match the stator spacing? Or is there some long-term "swelling" of the metal parts that results in this misalignment? I could correct the slightly-off spacing by pulling out the spacers on the rotor and grinding them down just a little bit each (literally, just a thousandth would be too much), but I think there must be something more fundamental that I'm missing :-). Tim. Pot metal. It suffers from grain boundary distortion caused by moisture. The problem is very common in some tuning caps used in TRF Majestic radios made in the early 1930s. One problem you'll is that the capacitance will be much higher than it should be if the plates aren't centered. The capacitor change isn't linear--that means that equally shifting the distance between a rotor plate and two stators from center causes an increase in capacitance. Intuitively, one would believe the changes would cancel each other. Pete k1zjh |
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