Is there any hope for my poor leaky germanium trannies?

Started by slacker, August 17, 2006, 05:31:32 PM

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slacker

I just bought some AC187Ks off ebay, they were cheap and I knew I was taking a bit of a gamble because the guy I got them off sells his own pedals so I guessed I might be buying his junk.

I tested them out in RG's transistor checker and they come up with leakage currents well over 1 milliamp ie: I get 3 or 4 volts across the 2.4k resister. Assuming this is correct and I'm pretty sure it is are these trannies any good for anything?
I know the conventional wisdom for fuzz faces is to discard any trannies that have leakages over about 500uA, but are there any circuits you can use them in?
I did try one as Q2 in a fuzz face style circuit with a low gain silicon for Q1 and it biases up with a reasonable collector resistor value and sounds Ok.