the Caps Wiki logo, showing a few bulging capacitors, with "Caps Wiki" text under it

Caps Wiki: Place For You To Share Your Repair Notes

A right-to-repair battle is being waged in courts. The results of it, we might not see for a decade. The Caps Wiki is a project tackling our repairability problem from the opposite end – making it easy to share information with anyone who wants to repair something. Started by [Shelby], it’s heavily inspired by his vintage tech repairs experience that he’s been sharing for years on the [Tech Tangents] YouTube channel.

When repairing a device, there are many unknowns. How to disassemble it? What are the safety precautions? Which replacement parts should you get? A sporadic assortment of YouTube videos, iFixit pages and forum posts might help you here, but you have to dig them up and, often, meticulously look for the specific information that you’re missing.

The Caps Wiki talks a lot about capacitor replacement repairs – but not just that. Any device, even modern ones, deserves a place on the Caps Wiki, only named like this because capacitor repairs are such a staple of vintage device repair. You could make a few notes about something you’re fixing, and have them serve as help and guideline for newcomers. With time, this won’t just become a valuable resource for quick repairs and old tech revival, but also a treasure trove of datapoints, letting us do research like “which capacitors brands or models tend to pass away prematurely”. Plus, it also talks about topics like mains-powered device repair safety or capacitor nuances!

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Repairing Vintage Clock Movements

It’s obvious that [Matthew] cares a great deal for vintage electric clocks. He is especially fond of the bedside alarm variety, which in our experience cast a warm orange glow on the numbers and emitted a faint, gentle hum. [Matthew] has written up a thorough treatment of Sunbeam movements in particular that covers identification, disassembly, cleaning, and repair.

These workhorse timepieces are cheap and fairly plentiful if you work the estate sale or thrift store circuit. Sometimes there is a bit of trouble with motor pinions disintegrating or the teeth wearing down on the nylon gears. The decades-old petroleum lubricant combined with heat from the spinning rotor can eat away at the motor pinion, causing it to crumble if disturbed.

Wishing to save some of these clocks from landfills, [Matthew] designed motor pin replacements specifically for Sunbeam electric movements, the relatively  inexpensive alternative that graced many a mid-century household clock. He only had the shaft and a broken original to work with, but was able to design a sturdy acrylic replacement using this involute spur gear builder to generate a DXF file. Then it was just a matter of creating an STL file with Rhino 3D and shipping it off to Shapeways.

If you’ve ever wanted to get into clock or watch repair, this looks like a great way to get your feet wet unless you’re ready for some serious vintage watch repair. There’s no need to reinvent the pinion because [Matthew] sells them through his site. If you have a printer, the STL files await you.