Autopsy of a Failed Vintage Carbon Resistor
A vintage carbon resistor from a Metrix oscilloscope was examined after it failed during repairs. Despite appearing intact, it measured significantly higher than its rated resistance, prompting an investigation into its internal structure. The autopsy revealed interesting construction details and a likely failure due to degraded contact between the terminals and the carbon material.
- ▪The resistor was rated at 20 kOhm but measured around 0.843 MOhm.
- ▪The autopsy involved sanding down the resistor to reveal its internal structure.
- ▪The failure was attributed to degraded contact between the terminals and the carbon material.
Hackaday files mainly under tech. We currently carry 244 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hackaday |
| Canonical URL | https://hackaday.com/2026/05/27/autopsy-of-a-failed-vintage-carbon-resistor/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 23:00:57 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T23:03:06.166Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T23:03:06.166Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ZNKtqbmye_5T |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Autopsy Of A Failed Vintage Carbon Resistor No comments by: Maya Posch May 27, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy Detail of the lead connecting to the inner carbon-filled tube. (Credit: CuriousMarc) Although resistors are hardly among the most exciting components, they are arguably one of the most important ones, as anyone who has done any amount of circuit design and debugging can attest to. So too with a single carbon resistor in a vintage Metrix oscilloscope that [CuriousMarc] recently repaired. After recapping the board there was still a major issue that got traced down to said resistor. After replacing it with a fresh resistor obviously this meant doing an autopsy to see why the old resistor had failed.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hackaday.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Hackaday
