bloomer_au wrote:
Thanks Michael. Well, I opened the monitor up hoping things would be easy to identify, but my electronic component knowledge comes from one term I did in year 9 at school. It wasn't evident to me what was what, or if it was elsewhere under metal casing, etc. I also tried using cursory 'smell power'. This is very unreliable but I got the feeling the other side (away from the power supply inlet) smelled worse. But when there was the flash and bang, it seemed to come from that other side. Your post has got me interested in starting to acquire skills in this area (and to learn to solder), but I am well far from any ability or ability to accurately diagnosis at this time. Maybe I can get a repair guy to do this one for me.
If you can find someone who works (worked) on TV sets, he/she can probably do the job. The capacitor is the "line filter" capacitor and must be of the "X2" type so that it burns out when it fails (instead of becoming a dead short on the AC line, depending entirely on the fuse for protection). BTW, I usually have to "air out" the device for a couple of weeks after removing the failed capacitor, so I can stand to be in the same room with it. ;-) There are other possible failures that begin with arcing and end with poof/bang, but the bad smell really identifies the impregnant in these X2 capacitors. -michael NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."