Overheating Capacitors

[Crusader]

I was talking to an Electrical Engineer yesterday and I asked him "If capacitors are over-heated will they be partially damaged or will they just die suddenly?" He said it depends on the type of capacitor etc.

So I'm asking the same question here, as he had no definitive answer

cheers

[mistermikev]

overheated is pretty general... it's hard to put a blanket statement over how all caps will react.  I can tell you that if you mean plugging 50v into a 16v electrolytic... "You will know".   google exploding capacitor.

[curtisa]

Caps will generally lose some of their capacitance when overheated, ie their value will go down.

Total failure is usually the result of some sudden shock to the capacitor, be it environmental, mechanical or electrical.

[Crusader]

On 9/10/2018 at 10:58 PM, mistermikev said:

overheated is pretty general... it's hard to put a blanket statement over how all caps will react.  I can tell you that if you mean plugging 50v into a 16v electrolytic... "You will know".   google exploding capacitor.

I mean overheating with a soldering iron, sorry I should have pointed that out, cheers

 

20 hours ago, curtisa said:

Caps will generally lose some of their capacitance when overheated, ie their value will go down.

Total failure is usually the result of some sudden shock to the capacitor, be it environmental, mechanical or electrical.

Thanks Curtisa, what effect there will be if their value goes down?. What I'm experiencing with my ES-137 is when the tone is down to zero the sound is rather "blurry" - a bit more than other guitars when compared. Is that the sort of thing one might expect?

[curtisa]

4 hours ago, Crusader said:

Thanks Curtisa, what effect there will be if their value goes down?. What I'm experiencing with my ES-137 is when the tone is down to zero the sound is rather "blurry" - a bit more than other guitars when compared. Is that the sort of thing one might expect?

Isn't that what tone at zero is meant to do?

All joking aside, lower capacitance in a guitar tone control should mean that less highs are affected. So if anything, this is the opposite of what you're describing.

What value is the tone cap? You could always change the cap out to be smaller, deliberately pushing the high frequency corner of the tone control further up the spectrum. The other trick you can do is add a resistor in between the pot and the cap, limiting how low the tone control can go when at zero.

[Crusader]

The value is the usual Gibson 223

Okay so it sounds like my caps are still good but in hindsight I would have left them alone. When you muck about with things if you hear something that doesn't sound right you conclude it must be because of what you did

Just for the record my aim was to get the ES to sound more like my R9 which is why I changed the cap arrangement to 59 wiring. I also dropped in a Seth Lover set which is all I needed to do really

Thanks guys for your input, cheers