After a 50 year search I may have found a "defective" flyback... well, someone else found it for me. I often wondered how could anyone screw up a coil of wire.... run out midstream & add another piece with a slip knot :-() Well this particular flyback did not ring out on pins 3 & 4, so I decided to find out why.
 I shaved the casing down a sliver at a time until I could see inside. What I found was that one end of the coil had snapped off it's terminal post & when touching it the winding did ring out. I removed the 2 terminal posts & cut away a little more to expose the winding wire which looked like pieces of thread. Best guess is that this is 32 ga wire or smaller.  I took the pic above thru a magnifying glass to try to capture the ends of the winding & they are still not visible. I'm sure that they ring out the windings at the manufacturer, so that leaves a possibility of it snapping during shipping or in handling it for installation. I know I have been guilty of bending the pins to fit the footprint better with a pair of needle-nose pliers myself & after seeing this I'll be more careful in the future. The reason I say this may be a factory defect is that even if it rang out good before shipping it may have been too taut to the terminal post making it prone to breaking, although this is the only one I've ever seen. One would think if a defect were to be in a specific component it would run through the whole batch made at that time.... akin to the peanut butter scare of a few years ago that effected the whole batch. |