 All right, so today I wanted to go over a special tool. That's this LCR meter the DER 5000 model Handheld LCR meter. This can be gotten pretty easily off of Amazon for about a hundred and four eight dollars in US dollars and the kit will come with a couple of handy attachments. This meter is excellent at testing electrolytic capacitors and it can even test SMD capacitors with one of the attachments and Those attachments are placed in the front here and so today's video I want to talk a little bit about the meter, but mostly about an upgrade that you'll probably need to do if you get this meter Just take a quick look here at the side of it and it's just really bulky Almost hard to handle tool. It's also slippery so it can slip out of your hands kind of easily while you're using it there's a nice little stand kickstand for it and The problem is when you use this attachment here This is the TL 21 attachment that comes with it. It has some Problems you'll notice right away after you put it in The main being that it has extremely short leads on the alligator clips you have to use both this positive and negative alligator clip to clip say a capacitor leg to one side and then a Obviously the negative capacitor leg to the other side and it just gets real cramped in there It's really short so there's not a lot of room for you to move your component around and honestly sometimes I get the Points to ground out against each other And then I have to move the capacitor around to get it to give me a proper reading Which you can just see kind of how little room you have to work with on a capacitor with this TL 21 as it sits Thankfully we can source some new cables and Replace the alligator clip cables that came with the TL 21 Attachment and these are the ones I'm using for this job I bought these off of eBay and they were sourced from China and the cost was $19 shipped. It probably took me about Three weeks to five weeks to get them in the mail. So there is a delay still for shipping But they are available for a reasonable price And so you want to use these and replace your alligator clips with these nice big handy prong clips And they they have a lot more space in them a lot more precision with that needle tip on This connection and it's just an overall higher quality Experience when you're going to be clipping to the legs of a capacitor Let's get started now on doing the upgrade and I'll walk you through step by step on how to change over the cables from these alligator clips over to the New bigger clips for the TL 21 attachment First off just remove the attachment and there are two screws in the back These are just straight Phillips head screws and then you can easily pull that top piece off of your shielding and plastic there of The TL 21 and you'll notice inside There is a zip tie that's in place that's holding together the cables to the PCB inside Just go ahead and snip that with some snips and then you'll need to get a tiny Phillips head screwdriver and there are four tiny Phillips head screws that are holding this PCB to the top side of the plastic housing for the TL 21 attachment We're going to do today's we're going to remove the solder and the old cables here and we're going to replace them with our Replacement clips and that way it'll just be an easy remove a desolder and then solder back into place the new cables And we'll start over here with the positive cable on the right-hand side and what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to measure out my cables I'm going to cut them to an even length and Each one of the cables has two points and Then each point has a ground so it's kind of like a normal audio video cable Or any other cable where it's just got a ground and then one lead inside of it And we're we're going to set this up as we're going to twist that ground together So the ground is on the same for The specific red clip which we're working on first So we'll have the ground twisted together and we'll have the other two sides twisted and ready and Place some solder on there and have them wicked and ready to go and tend excuse me so we're going to get here. I'm using my HACCO FR 301 and removing the solder from these points and Then we'll get this cable out of the way and get it prepped for our replacement cable I'm going to do my best to clean out a lot of the old solder off the pads on both sides of this PCB for my Replacement cables to come into and I'll also be leaving the negative cable in place for the time being just to make Sure that I can basically quality control and check myself to make sure I don't make any errors. Oh No, it's a pretty simple job. You just put your cable into place and then get behind it and add a little flux and Use your soldering iron and then use your solder and tack your cables into place just make sure you have a good flow on there and Then you can go back and check your work. Make sure you've done everything correctly and The way again, I showed you how this works is these clips They're both that there are two leads on it, but they just soldered to the same point So you're basically telling the PCB when it it has continuity between those two points that it will You know register that something's connected on that side and then the same thing with the negative side over here and so There's a lot of great videos more on how to use this Meter completely and everything it does because it does more than just check capacitors for their Capacitance, you know, you can measure a lot of life span things on that as well as diodes You could check and resistors so they're you know, I'd recommend checking out somebody that did a full review and shows Every feature of the model that I've got here But it is pretty good for the price and again, it is highly rated And a lot of people have used it and recommended it. You'll probably need to get a region of your For the manual the manual that I had actually came and it was in Chinese or was an English translation But those are available online So what I'm doing here is I'm just cleaning up this solder and making sure that everything looks nicely On this and then I'll go in after I'm finished with this and clean it of course with some alcohol But it's a fun little project that at the end of the day You'll see how much better our meter looks and works Once we have these new clips compared to the old short alligator clips that came with it There is one thing I want to mention that I will often get asked about this meter and it is does this meter test components while they're in series meaning can you Test a capacitor without removing it from the PCB while it's still attached and to be honest with you It can't I wasn't able to get any good readings of any capacitors that I tested that were in series this was only really specific and Good for Removing the capacitor Testing it and then if you had to you could replace it back. So that's definitely Something I wanted to mention about this meter is it cannot do that now. We can reassemble this PCB inside The plastic housing and you want to make sure that you've given yourself a good amount of space here because it's gonna be really a tight fit When you try to stack those cables on top of each other. So go ahead and place the Phillips head screws the tiny ones back in and Reattach those and make sure everything's lined up perfectly there because your cables all four of them need to stack two on two We took on top of each other and then you'll have a tight fit between that and the last lid that you need to put into place The top lid for the TL 21 and then you'll have to flip it over and install the screws back there But you can tell it's it's quite a tight fit but it definitely works with this cable set and again, I'll have a link to both the meter and the Cables that I bought off of eBay in the description and please note that I don't personally get paid on any of these things I have not got anything set up where I get anything from any Vendor links or anything. These are literally tools that I personally use in CRT and other kind of old PCB repairs Especially for old components. So now we've got everything tested or put back together and we really just need to run a test and Make sure that our new cables are checking out and will work for what we want to do So I've got the same capacitor as before and we'll run a check on that capacitor First I need to show you how to calibrate your meter because we definitely need to do that now that we've changed the cables It's gonna ask us to leave the cables untouched or the Connection open meaning nothing connected for 30 seconds and then it'll give us a pass rating if it's good and then you collect the Calibrate button again and now you need to short it so we'll clip the two ends together on there and then Set it up to where we can see it as well as go back to the meter press calibrate again and we'll start another 30 second countdown and Thankfully everything worked out. Well, and we passed our calibration test. So now we can go on and test our capacitor So I'm just going to connect the Negative side and the positive side together here on this same capacitor Which is a 47 micro farad capacitor and our reading is 48 point two three right now on this setting and So that's well right at the same almost reading that we had before I'm betting we're getting a little bit better reading and connection with our new cables here than we were with our original small short Cables if take a quick look back at these tiny little cables and I'll show you here real quickly What our readings were when we went back and I use those little clip cables You can just see how big of a pain it was to just even use those We'll see yep. We had forty eight point two one. So we're right in line there So if you buy this meter, you'll definitely benefit from doing this upgrade and you'll still be under a hundred twenty five dollars for total cost I feel like it's a great deal But hey, if you have any meter that you'd like to mention Please leave it in the comments below and if you enjoyed the video thought it was helpful Please give it a thumbs up. Thanks again for watching guys and I'll see you next time with some more retro content