So I was rebuilding a Sys80 pop driver board and I replaced the transistor with a tip102 I had bought from a guy on Amazon 4 years ago. Looking at the bulk packaging I don't think I had used any of these since I bought them.

I put 4 of them into this board and each one shorted on the first use in a machine. I would get 1 pop and it would lock on. On the bench (Clay's bench tester) it worked perfect every time at 12VDC.

I was able to eliminate the 2 ics by testing in known good boards, replaced the caps and tested diodes and resistors. Finally I pulled an old but testing good transistor from a parts pbdb and it works fine.

Is it possible these are counterfeit and would someone go to the trouble to counterfeit parts this cheap?

If not any idea what would cause them to fail so quickly?

#5 5 years ago

CHD

Cheddar

GoldenStatePin

Lodi, CA

11y 117K 5,181 17 10

Quoted from kvan99:
Maybe it's a bad batch...why would you counterfeit a cheap and readily available transistor? Making it look like a Tip102 is like 90% of the work already.

Also possible. Not worth messing with. I'm dumping these in the trash

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