SORTING CAPSWow, took me only 4 or 5 hours to sort that 1.2+ kg of caps.
In the end it all does fit in that drawer unit. I even have some space left : one of the 3 big drawers + the mega huge / full width one at the very bottom.... which is just as fine because I have 4 big boxed of scrap boards to dismantle, most modern SMPS stuff, so lots of caps to come !
Dwagon it's not for prototyping, it's more for fixing people's stuff on the cheap, because buying even just a few caps to fix the PSU in a TV or whatever, at the local electronics shop, spend 2+ hours driving there and back, queuing, wasting petrol and car wear/maintenance... HOPING it would fix the problem... and even if it does, owner of the gear will give me 5 bucks if I am lucky... no, I am losing money !
It can only be doable if I have crappy old caps to fix their stuff, 100% free, no shipping/traveling, no nothing... 100% free components because salvaged and available immediately on hand. Anything just won't do.
Recently when I fixed these two 22" monitors .. was tired caps on the PSU.. I was glad to have my crappy old caps ! They were plenty good enough to bring back the monitors to life, hence confirming the diagnosis. Then, I was now 100% sure that the caps would fix the problem, so since I decided I wanted to keep these monitors for myself, and use them... of course I was more than happy IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE, to spent a few Euros at Farnel to get nice brand new quality caps, and pay shipping.
But as I said this sorting was just a first pass at tidying things up. This led me to scrap all caps below 1uF since they are so tiny and can easily be replaced with film caps...
In a second pass, I think I will do as you said and scrap lots of them... not all, but most of them.
the bulk of the caps are hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of tiny caps in the 1uF to 100uF range. Several actually overflowed ! Had to trim the excess and scrap it, so as to manage to get the drawer to close !
As for the 47uF ones.. I had so many of them I could fill TWO drawers full of them !
I will never use that many (I am not very productive....), and since they were all salvaged 30 years ago when I was a teen, from gear obviously 10 or 20 years old than that... so this hundreds of tiny caps are.. 40/50 years old.
So since I don't need so many of them, and since very small caps like these cost bugger all, and since I have only so many different values between 1uF and 100uF... I think I will soon scrap all of them, and buy new ones instead. I will keep only the big ones because these cost a lot of money...I have a drawer dedicated to big cap wqith low value/ high voltage rating. Another drawer for the 400/450V ones for SMPS... as you said sorted by type ;-) so I can get easily find what I want.
The old big values ones I also want to keep, even the crusty ones... because sometimes you just want to make big sparks for fun, it's therapeutic, without risking mega expensive brand new quality caps !!!
I need "old crap" that I can torture carelessly and set on fire or reverse bias to make them go bang, if so I decide !!!
To each their own of course, but as of now, that's how I think I will go about my electrolytic caps !
Can't wait to go pick up a label printer on Monday and start making all these drawer look pretty and talkative...
BTW I used my Chinese component tester, spent 30 minutes checking each and every of my x75 or so 470uF caps and... believe it or not only a handful were bad... and not even BAD... just a bit too much out of spec, but absolutely nothing delirious either ESR or capacitance-wise. I was stunned...