Anyone out there with past experience in restoring a 41-180 console? I am about to embark on a project. I would appreciate any input on what you went thru and any showstoppers to watch out for. Thanks for your help.
Gary
I have successfully restored both 41-280 and 40-150 (similar to 40-180), as well as similar 41-250. (As far as I know there is no such thing as a 41-180, so maybe you got the model numbers mixed up.) The main "gotchas" are the band switch and the rubber wire. The rubber wire is probably all rotted and prone to shorts, so it should be replaced or insulated with shrink wrap on both sets. The 40-180 band switch is pretty simple, and should not pose a problem, but on the 41-280 it is a multi-wafer switch that is difficult to work with. I replaced all the rubber wire at the band switch that I could reach easily, and slipped shrink wrap over the ones that were hard to reach.
Replacing the wires on the 41-280 band switch is a long, nasty job, but just requires patience. Ron suggests removing the wafers for access to the wires, but I didn't do that because I could unsolder or sleeve all the wires without too much difficulty.
To replace the rotted rubber wires, I simply unsoldered them, marked the locations with color coded alligator clips, and drew pictures to ensure that I got everything back in the right place. My 41-280 and 41-250 worked before I started, so I turned it on again after every couple of wires to make sure I had everything re-installed correctly.
The 40-150 and similar 40-180 have two filter cap cans. I restuffed both of those and wired them back into the circuit as they were originally. You could also cut them out of the circuit and install modern electrolytics under the chassis where they will not be visible. I bought original value 'lytics from Just Radios, but similar modern values will work just fine.
Other than that the restoration is a pretty straightforward recap job. I replaced the caps and measured the resistors at the same time I replaced the wires. About 75% of the resistors were out of tolerance so I replaced all of those, too. I used + or - 10% as my resistor tolerance, but some people only replace those 20% or more out.
The on-off switch on my 41-280 was broken, so I replaced that with a modern, similar switch that I got at Ace Hardware. There are several threads on this forum about replacing those switches.
I also restuffed the potted bakelite caps in the AC circuit. I used X/Y caps that I bought from Just Radios. I added a 1 Amp slo-blo fuse between the hot leg of the AC line and the bakelite caps and polarized the plug to make sure the fuse was always on the hot side. I also rewired the on-off switch to put it between the fuse and the bakelite caps. This keeps AC off of the bakelite caps when the radio is off, and also keeps the small amount of AC that goes through those caps off of the chassis when the radio is off.
Once restored, these radios performed beautifully. One other thing: the 40-150 performed oddly with the random-wire antenna I use in my workshop. There were odd whistles and some stations appeared at "ghost" locations on the dial as well as the proper locations. All these problems went away when I connected the stock antenna and reinstalled the back. I don't know whether this is a problem with the 40-180 or not. I aligned the sets (except for IF alignment) with the original antennas connected and got great results on all bands.