Now there's another interesting thing. I wouldn't have thought that Orlando, given the extremes of humidity that it suffers, would have been a very good place for manufacturing capacitors, or was it just 'wet' electrolytics that were made there ? Or was the whole plant environment-controlled ? Guess you wouldn't be able to afford to do that these days ...
Arfa
Air conditioned factories were, and are common for electronics in the US. When you consider the time it takes to wind a mylar capacitor and dip it into epoxy, there isn't much time to adsorb moisture. If the humidity is too low you will build up a static charge on the mylar, then it will to stick to the rollers in the handling and winding machines.
The Microdyne plant where I worked was fully air conditioned, and it was about two hours north of Orlando.
I don't suppose a plant manufacturing capacitors has to be very big. At least the assembly building. It's easy enough to imagine a climate controlled assembly room. And Mike is right about the history of capacitors. I lived through the era when manufacturing stopped giving a s*it about quality over pumping out volumes of crap.
Sprague continued to make them, but most manufacturers had been taken over by MBA bean counters by then. They were still making high quality parts, till Vishay bought them.
Thanks everyone for your help!
nicholas
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