Rebuilding Philco 87 condenser box with pics

[DKinYORKpa]

Having never done this sort of thing before, I thought that I'd share my experience and choices. Since un-soldering and removing all of the wires to this box seemed tedious, I disconnected the box from the chassis and carefully separated the box from its bottom (the part that I didn't want to remove the wires from). This took a little coaxing and wiggling, but eventually I was able to reach in and snip all of the wires. After some cleaning and unsoldering the lugs, I had ten nice clean terminals. I did crack the strip slightly under the chassis. A longer, thinner wire cutter would have helped.



Stepping outside with my heat gun and various tools, I finally was able to pull out the caps. I was unable to quickly and easily soften up the guts, though. I think patience is key here.



Next I cut some pieces of plywood to make an L shaped inert for the box. I fastened 2- 5 lug terminal strips across from each other and numbered them to best fit all of the caps. Despite all of my careful work, I managed to forget a 2.0 mfd and one 1.0 should have been a .1. I hadn't soldered yet, so no problem. Then I put a wire to every terminal lug. I made them all the same length, but I could have sized each one. With longer terminal strips, the ground lug could have been shared by 2 lugs and I wouldn't have had so many connections on that one lug.



Then it was a matter of connecting each wire to the correct lug on the chassis strip.



There was plenty of room in the box for the wires, so as I lowered the box down, I had to push a few of them out of the way.



It slid down the rest of the way nicely and I reattached the screws. Talk about a Let's-see-what-happens moment........well, the hum is gone (mostly) and it works a lot better. Now for that neutralizing business.......great, something else for the first time.

[7estatdef]

Messy ain't it! Nice job!! For the extra hum adj the hum pot over by the power transformer for least hum.
Terry