rosew37•1mo agoOG Member

Spent 4 hours chasing a capacitor issue that was actually a bad solder joint

I was working on this old Pioneer receiver from the 70s and the left channel kept cutting out. Checked all the caps with my ESR meter and they tested fine. Turned out one of the previous repair guys had a cold solder joint on the ground pin. Has anyone else wasted forever on a simple solder problem?

2 comments

2 Comments

richard_wells591mo ago

Hold on, you chased it for four hours with an ESR meter and it was just a cold solder joint? That's brutal. I've been there though, spent a whole weekend on a Marantz 2230 that had intermittent crackling. Pulled every cap, tested them one by one, even swapped out the transistors. Turned out it was a tiny hairline crack in the trace right at the input jack. Just didn't see it until I poked at it with a plastic tool. Those old boards are like landmines sometimes, especially after someone else has been in there with a cheap iron. You expect the big components to fail but it's always the dumb little connection that gets you. I swear the next time I hear crackling I'm just reflowing every single joint first before I even pull out a multimeter.

lilyo301mo ago

Richard_wells59 nailed it with the hairline crack comment. I've got a tube amp on the bench right now that had a weird hum, and I swear I checked every cap and resistor twice before finding a cracked solder joint on the cathode pin. It's always the little things that bite you. Those old boards get brittle after decades of heat cycles, and a bad repair job just makes it worse. You think you're dealing with a dead component when really the connection is just flaky.