09-04-2018, 06:17 PM
GE Back together and (mostly) working! Got a bit of clean up done on it as well.
The record changer still needs work. As I said earlier, the cartridge needs redone. Had the changer going and it worked rather slick, but it jammed up again, so later on I'll pull the whole unit and see what happened. GE did not make it easy to thread the wires through the two mis-matched holes of the changer drawer and the main cabinet! Got a nice slice on my finger from the last fight!
I finally opted to buy two more new 6AK5 tubes for this radio and it now has all three new tubes in it for those. Also, I did a little 'musical tubes' and found a set of tubes it seems to really like. It does have one quirk though, you can't set anything on it, bump it, or set something down heavily withing roughly a one foot radius to the console or it messes up the FM. The cause is wear in the band switch right on the FM2 setting. It is a tiny bit of thrust wear that is enough mess things up if you jolt it just right. Other than that I need to find a way to make the transformer run a little cooler. It starts to warm up after a half hour and is pretty warm after an hour or so. Not so bad that I can't keep my hand on it, but even though rated for 125 volts, we are running close out here at 120. Might not be so bad down at the house though. Sadly, the guy who redid this for me misunderstood and thought I was saying the main resistor was bad, which of course it wasn't and he never added a step-down resistor for the voltage. Oy!
The record changer still needs work. As I said earlier, the cartridge needs redone. Had the changer going and it worked rather slick, but it jammed up again, so later on I'll pull the whole unit and see what happened. GE did not make it easy to thread the wires through the two mis-matched holes of the changer drawer and the main cabinet! Got a nice slice on my finger from the last fight!
I finally opted to buy two more new 6AK5 tubes for this radio and it now has all three new tubes in it for those. Also, I did a little 'musical tubes' and found a set of tubes it seems to really like. It does have one quirk though, you can't set anything on it, bump it, or set something down heavily withing roughly a one foot radius to the console or it messes up the FM. The cause is wear in the band switch right on the FM2 setting. It is a tiny bit of thrust wear that is enough mess things up if you jolt it just right. Other than that I need to find a way to make the transformer run a little cooler. It starts to warm up after a half hour and is pretty warm after an hour or so. Not so bad that I can't keep my hand on it, but even though rated for 125 volts, we are running close out here at 120. Might not be so bad down at the house though. Sadly, the guy who redid this for me misunderstood and thought I was saying the main resistor was bad, which of course it wasn't and he never added a step-down resistor for the voltage. Oy!
No matter where you go, there you are.
