About Badcaps



History


Badcaps was founded on the success of PROJECT:VP6, an article written on recapping the Abit VP6 motherboard. In the months following the articles publishing, we had hundreds of emails asking questions, sharing success stories, and tips to improve things. We also received many questions from people with other devices suffering from capacitor issues. We decided to create a central location for information, how-to's, replacement parts, datasheets, and repair services all in one location. Since the launch of this site in April of 2003, the response and feedback has been remarkable with hundreds of thousands of visitors using our service each month!


Badcaps capacitor repair facility
The Badcaps facility, located near Salem, Missouri.


We were established in late 2002 to counter the bad electrolytic capacitor issue that had been plaguing hardware since around the turn of the century. The bad capacitor issue really began to blossom into the mainstream as a "real world" problem around 1999, and continues on to the present day although to a much lesser extent. We are still seeing some later model devices with this problem. The tale behind why the capacitor problem existed in the first place is because of large-scale industrial espionage. Some component manufacturers decided to "acquire" an electrolyte formula from another competitor. Little known to them, the stolen formula was incomplete and flawed. They didn't discover this until it was too late and they had manufactured and distributed literally MILLIONS of these flawed capacitors. However, it's been going on way too long to simply blame an industrial espionage issue, as this problem is still common. Unfortunately, these days it is mostly down to sub-standard components that are manufactured by low-budget component manufacturers.

Most of the information about capacitor faults is scattered in bloated forums, newsgroups, and unreliable websites. That in itself is enough to make resolving an issue a daunting prospect. We have stepped in, gathering a lot of information, along with our own knowledge and experience, to create a central location to post it. Our aim has always been to help those on a tight budget be able to repair their hardware in a reliable yet inexpensive manner. So far, we have succeeded with hundreds of thousands of devices saved.


The Future of Capacitor Search


Going forward the technical forum will remain a crucial aspect of this website. We want to enhance and develop knowledge sharing. Additionally, we want to develop a better way to select and order replacement quality capacitors. We will do this with our new Capacitor Search Engine. One priority for us is to convince engineers to buy quality capacitors from quality manufacturers. With our new search engine we can suggest quality replacements for any capacitor.

For 20 years we have collected parametric data, historical pricing, & stock availability from leading capacitor manufacturers. Mostly collected from authorized distributors, however, we are now building strong direct relationships with some of the world's leading capacitor manufacturers.

Many improvements to our search engine are coming. We have the experience and believe we can offer a significant leap-forward in the capacitor selection process.

Our data includes coverage from:

  • - Panasonic
  • - KEMET
  • - Nichicon
  • - Rubycon
  • - Vishay
  • - KYOCERA AVX
  • - Cornell Dubilier
  • - ELNA
  • - TDK Electronics


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