My Airport Base station(basestation) died from a poorly designed power supply. Apple 'care' refused to help me(that is, $50 to have a look, plus the cost of repair (ooooh, 2 caps, 5 hours labour...)), citing lack of warranty on the device. Not sure about product law, but it seems to me that if something has a design flaw then it should be the companies job to make sure that it is fixed. As they won't do anything about it, I figure I can at least vent steam here and warn other people of this gotcha.
There are several websites explaining how to fix it:
However, in my case I figure that as the base station merely adds another machine to my network, an extra hop in latency, and another ethernet port to maintain, I am going to use the card in it inside our wallmount laptop firewall and thus skip one layer in our network. I guess if anyone wants an apple internal modem card, or an amd 486 firewall then they should email me.
Ajh suggested that considering the case causes the system to overheat we could leave the plastic case off, and thus rather than stuffing around trying to fit another set of caps, we could do a dodgy fit by cutting off the legs and attaching new, _big_ caps in their place.