Crap from eBay #3: Capacitor: Tested, working.
Wednesday, March 4, 2026 at 08:39:08
It’s been a while since I’ve done an eBay junk post, so it’s high time. The amount of AI slop has toned itself down a little bit, the wild descriptions of a few years ago have settled into a generic “A valuable and quality device” for most things. No, your hobbyist signal generator from 1963 isn’t widely used in industry.
There are other things on eBay that are quite amusing, however. One of those are these listings for a Delco Vibrator. No, that’s not a toy you have to go to those shops downtown in back alleys for, it’s an electro-mechanical part that was used in automotive radios when tubes were still king. It’s a relay that turns itself off, so it just sits there and vibrates at whatever speed it can, turning power on and off. It’s a mechanical pulse generator, and the pulses it generated were fed to a step-up transformer in order to make B+ for the tubes. There are modern solid-state equivalents if you want to rebuild an old car radio, but sometimes you want to open a can and stuff it so it looks like the OEM part.
So why post these? They’re amusingly bad - and in some cases probably an outright lie. They’re all Delco 1220155 Vibrators, and a few minutes online would tell you that. Names and prices have been removed to protect the guilty!
Part #1
This one purports to be a “Delco Radio Speaker Capacitor???” Not sure what a Capacitor??? is, but here’s one if you need it.
According to the seller, it’s a double-DIN radio as well. It’s from a working radio to boot.
Part #2
This is the good one. It’s also a capacitor, and the seller has tested it and found that it works. I’m confused as to how this happened, but apparently - it did. Is the seller just writing things there to fill space? Even Mister Owl doesn’t know the answer to that question.
But you get some dust from their warehouse!
Part #3
This is probably the best one. It is from a seller that purports to be an auto parts seller, and that the unit was left-over from a recent restore. It’s also a “Speaker Capacitor???” - if you’re selling auto parts and restoring cars, wouldn’t it be in your best interests to actually, oh, I don’t know, know what you’re selling?
While I could see where an inexperienced seller would make a mistake - these do look like capacitor cans - all you need to do it spend a bit of time online to find out exactly what this is.
Yeah, it’s a “Capacitor???”
Not.
Next part of this series: Coming sometime.
Previous part of this series: https://wereboar.com … igh-cost-high-value/