When should be a good idea to do a re-capping?

Howsit?

I have been on a mad re-capping of late (1 x SMS, 1 x SMS2, 1 x MCD, 1 x SCD, 1 x MD, 2 x 32X, 1 x Gen 2, 1 x SCD2). Got a few consoles to go though lol! Funnily I enjoy replacing the capacitors, maybe a sense of "she'll be right for another 10-15yrs" accomplishment.

When in people's opinion is the "cut-off" (at this stage) where re-capping is not worth it, be it if the console works or not? I say that as when I changed the capacitors in my WORKING SCD and MCD the caps had clearly been leaking.

Reason I ask is I am thinking of fitting new caps into consoles up to and including my Playstation (SCPH-1002) and Sega Saturn.

I went to use my Sega Saturn this morning, for the first time in about 9 months. It had trouble reading official discs. I thought it may have been the 4 in 1...nope, the naughty chip....nope. I tried Duke Nukem and it would only load as far as the first level intro screen. I replaced the laser with a good one and this fixed it, but I am thinking it could be deeper than that.

Thoughts?

 

I would say 20 years but maybe before as for the Saturn the laser can get dust inside the lens i had a dreamcast in storage for a year and was loading before storage and after never loaded a game ever again was not in a loft and was in a carry case.

as for the Saturn problem seems like a problem i had once before sonic jam is a great test getting it to play all cm on the movie thing as it stress tests the sh chips that can go bad.
i have not yet found a fix for that.

 

Electrolytic capacitors have a shelf life of about 8 years, but often work past that. You should only replace them when there's a problem that indicates they need replacing.

Laser diodes die, it happens. Even the service manual will tell you once it deviates outside its usable range, replace it.

 

Thanks for the response guys, after re-visiting this it did seem to be the mod-chip I had in there was causing issue's. My back-up saturn had a different mod-chip in there and it now works better (not awesome, just better).