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A few days ago, I got in a Zenith 4B231, nice little 6 volt farm set (seller thought it had a missing cord). The case looks pretty nice, and I may not even try to refinish it.
However, this is what it looked like from the back.
Note the forest green house paint, laid on with a fairly large brush.
This is after I have scraped and sanded part of the chassis. I have also removed the cans over the IF's, RF coil, and vibrator. I stripped those, sanded, primed and repainted them with stainless steel paint (closest thing I could find to the original look).
As you can see, underneath the green was some awful neon orange house paint (both are enamel and very difficult to remove..) This is after more scraping and sanding. I have now applied a generous coating of paint remover, and will see later this evening if it has softened it up enough to remove without a chisel. If I end up having to remove everything from the chassis in order to clean all that garbage off of there, I will. I'll do the same as I did with the cans, since I have no way of getting any hammertone brass paint.
Wish me luck!
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Home depot sells hammered brass and copper paints. It is a spray paint and actually looks pretty good.
Wish I could do chassis work like that.
I will be watching for your progress repainting the house, 
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Just when I think that I've seen it all.... a previous owner of a set paints their chassis GREEN.....
Ain't people GREAT ??? 
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What a pain in the neck. Three more hours this evening of scraping... the paint remover got the layer of green off, but really did nothing for the orange, and so I scrape.. I've gotten to seriously thinking of breaking out the drill and removing the sockets and soldering strips. I've got blind rivets to put them back in with, so at least that is no big deal.
As you can see, I'm down to about 1/3 of the chassis left to clean, then I have to deal with masking and priming before applying the paint. Unfortunately, I do not have access to Home Despot here, so I must go with what I can get at the PX.
BTW, at least the green looked better than the orange. Why do people do this?
(This post was last modified: 02-06-2014, 09:29 AM by BrendaAnnD.)
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Well... for the same reason they: (1) Put bright red grillecloth on a Philco 20B Deluxe; (2) Paint the cabinet of a Philco 16B with a wonderful combo of white house paint and gold spray paint; (3) put BASEBALL CARD stickers all over an otherwise PRISTINE Philco 44B cathedal; (4) Carve "Edna" in the sides and top of a 6S128 Zenith.
Yep... these are examples of things previous owners did to sets I had.
Why indeed....
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the last one I can explain - a horny man thinks with a part of the body other than his head. Carving a woman's name on a radio is really a trifle compared with what is sometimes done.
(This post was last modified: 02-06-2014, 09:54 AM by morzh.)
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Bren, take that dial off before it gets messed up!
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I plan on it, Bill. It already had paint splatter on it from previous 'improvements'.
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No....this type of restoration takes a whole new level of boldness...the one I don't possess.
My hat's off to you Brenda, I would fully forgo this radio.
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The radio is an excellent performer, or I may not have bothered. Someone had been in and recapped a lot of it already (modern caps, doubt it was more than a few years ago), but apparently gave up when they couldn't get it to work. I found the problem right away, it was the RF choke in the power supply.
It is a pain to strip this chassis, but what the hey... new experience and all that. I just hope it turns out looking significantly better than it did.
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Well, many folks buy an old radio hoping they could re-cap it (they had heard the buzzword) and then it would work and they would have the bragging rights.
Sometimes it is bit more complex than simple recap.
(This post was last modified: 02-06-2014, 08:09 PM by morzh.)
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I would take those coils off before something happens to them, all it takes is one slip. It may be worth it just to take everything else off of the chassis, if you have the rivets anyhow, and set up an electrolysis tank to get the rest of that paint off.
Regards
Arran
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I wish I could set up an electrolysis tank, but the chemicals are not available to the average person. This is still considered a 'hot war zone', and a lot of things are pretty strictly controlled. I can't even buy electrolyte for batteries. C'est la vie.. just got to work with what I can get.
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I'd bead-blast the naked chassis, then paint away. Got a motor pool/shop on post?
73 Dennis
Pacing the cage...
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