To recap or not to recap.....

If it still works with original parts, do not change anything. Thorough and careful cleaning both inside and outside is all you should do.
Some types of old electrolytic capacitors can be repaired without soldering: those which have a small hole on their body, sealed with rubber or enamel. If the capacitor gets dry, the sealant can be removed, a drop of distilled water can be placed instead. After some water soaks in, its rest must be removed and the hole resealed. The capacitor may work OK again.

BR from Ivan

That is the question...

I've just bought an old Mitubishi 8x-815L transistor radio from eBay, serial number 8237617. It's bound to be at least 40 years old since they started making these in 1965!

Now this is THE radio I grew up with, my mother bought one of these from new and it lived most of its life in the kitchen, next to the kettle and tea caddy. I remember stealing it on occasion and my sister and I would often listen to Tony Blackburn or Noel Edmunds play the top 20 on a Sunday evening. We'd sit there with a tape recorder and a hand microphone and record our favourite tunes. Dad put in a 1/4 inch jack socket into the side of it so he could plug in his old Fergusson reel to reel recorder. I didn't realise until half an hour ago, all he did was replace the 1/8" jack that was already there - I thought he's fitted the whole thing from scratch

Anyway, this little radio came with a set of old duracell batteries, which were binned upon first sight of ooze and crud leaking from them (I thought Duracell's were leakproof???) So it's sat here now, playing merrily away on a set of GP alkaline cells, albeit with a pretty good amount of interference generated by my laptop The wavechange switch is smooth and noiseless in operation, sensitivity is as good as my Grundig Music Boy 165 on MW and LW. What is interesting, is that it's LW tuner extends up to over 400KHz, the Grundig stops at around 280 KHz.

When you take a look inside it, all the components look like modern devices, there's no large capacitors, strange colour coded resistors or anything like what you may expect to see, it's all fairly standard stuff - even the IFT's are small 10mm types. But what really jumped out at me was the variable capacitor - it's a twin gang open construction type, and it's a work of art to look at - none of those little square plastic varicons in here, this is proper aluminium vanes and brass spindle stuff, all mounted on a good lump of sheet aluminium with its trimmer capacitors. As one added little touch, there is a spring clip attached to the side of the set, holding a small bag containing an earphone - I do not remember this on my mother's kitchen radio, so to me the fact it's there is a bonus

It works faultlessly, I know I should really change the capacitors for nice new ones, but I think I'll wait until it develops a fault, why risk breaking something when it's working perfectly fine.

When I can find my little xD memory card and charge a set of AA nimh cells, I'll update this post with some pictures

Any thoughts guys?