Where to buy capacitors?

[ejmpower]

Doing some "maintanace" on my instrument cluster and would like to know where people get their capacitors, having a hard time finding the right ones. I live in Santa Barbara, CA.

[Joestancampiano]

I buy from DigiKey electonics (http://www.digikey.com/) they seem to have most everything electronic and have a great catalog.

Joe

[Elekta]

<chiming in>
would it be a capacitor that needs replacing if your instrument language button goes on the fritz? I have a Euro spec touring, and when I disco'd the battery a while back everything reset back to German. I had a hell of a time pushing the button on the right with the ignition key in the proper position...damn near pushed all the blood out of my thumb. I did get it to scroll to English, but the trunk warning reads boot lid open and such....

If this indeed is a capacitor issue, how hard a fix is this? PN#? Archive procedure link?

TIA,

geoff

[ejmpower]

I buy from DigiKey electonics (http://www.digikey.com/) they seem to have most everything electronic and have a great catalog.

Joe
Wow that website is more than complete, which capacitors did you go with? There are so many brands and different types just for the 22 microF 40V alone!

[Anthony (M5 in Calgary)]

Wow that website is more than complete, which capacitors did you go with? There are so many brands and different types just for the 22 microF 40V alone!

Just pick a cap with 105C temp rating and if you have another choice go with one rated for longer life. I wouldn't go tantalums - if the engineers wanted tants they would have used them in the original design.

Anthony

[Javier]

PRICE. I would never take the trouble to replace them and use the same s....

Javier

[SRR2]

You won't find exact replacements because capacitor technology has marched onward and the technology in the cluster is 10-15 years old. Generally you can safely use higher voltage and/or higher capacitance as a substitute. I just replaced all the caps in my cluster and uprated every one of them. Ideally you'll want to look for the 105C rating and low-ESR types intended for switching regulators.

You will have to do some research to find out what values and quantities you need for your particular cluster. It looks to me that there are at least three different designs, all of which use different components.

One thing you need to be careful of is the height of the replacements. There were a couple of caps in my cluster that needed to be low profile types. I ended up having to lay down the new ones because short ones in the values required weren't readily available.

BTW, in my cluster three caps were totally shot, and the others were still in reasonable shape. Regardless, I replaced all of them just because 16 year old caps are too old.

Regarding tantalum replacements, you can do that but you'll have a very difficult time find the values you need, if you can find them at all. Plus, the tantalums are quite heavy compared to aluminum electrolytic of the same value, so you'd need to figure a way to bond them to the board to avoid the inevitable vibration failure. In the overall scheme of things, these new electrolytic caps from Nichicon and Panasonic (the two primary sources you'll find at DigiKey) are so good that you don't need the extra performance of the solid tantalums.