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Reforming caps

Quick couple of questions on reforming caps in old equipment. First off, this relates to old equip in general, but specifically I'm working right now on a Fisher amp (uses a voltage doubler). I've read over a number of posts on the subject, but the best I've found is advice to replace caps is they have "excessive" hum or "excessive" leakage. What's excessive? I have no hum at all on this amp, even on the phono input with my 97+db Fostex's. The cans get slighlty warm, but they are next to a warm transformer and hot output tubes. I can open the cap circuit and measure dc current flow, but again, I'm not sure what would be considered excessive. Thoughts?
On a related topic, I sometimes pick up an interesting unit on ebay for myself or a firend and then do some restoration on it. Almost always the seller will say, "Well, I plugged it in and all the tubes light up." I'm relatively sure this isn't done on a variac. So... of what value is reforming over several hours with a variac, if someone else has already applied full voltage for some undetermined amount of time? Once you hit the cans with full B+, is there any point to the slow variac method?
Thanks!
Steve


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Topic - Reforming caps - SteveBrown 14:25:44 12/27/03 (17)


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