You found it. A Scott 299 under a moving blanket, a Dynaco ST-70 behind the water heater, a console radio your uncle swears “worked when we put it up there.” It smells like a basement, and one thought is running through your head: let’s plug it in and see if it lights up.

Every few months someone on a forum announces they’re going to “reform” a shoebox of NOS capacitors, and the replies split into two camps: the ones who insist it’s mandatory, and the ones who insist it’s folk medicine. Both camps are right about a subset of parts and wrong about the rest. The difference comes down to chemistry — specifically, what the dielectric in an aluminum electrolytic actually is, and what an applied voltage does to it.