General Electric 417A - Printable Version
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General Electric 417A - Jayce - 09-01-2018
After nearly a week of work, I have the GE 417A back home and back together with the better dial placed in the cabinet. Other than the FM being a bit off on the dial due to the dial staying in the cabinet, the guy did a pretty good job of reviving this set. The only two issues left are: The magnetic cartridge needs rebuilt. It's not very lively, even with a full recap of the pre-amp. Probably petrified rubber parts. The other issue is, even after cleaning with lubricated cleaner, the treble control feels rather course. It's fine from the 'off' position to the number '1' position, but after it's a bit rough feeling. Works fine, though and I have the parts chassis. Other than that, I might look into getting one of the speakers re-coned in the future. I repaired seven small cracks around the edge of the original speaker from this unit and four on the spare speaker. Still, the original seems to be holding and sounds good.
In fact, this radio performs surprisingly well and I dare say it is the first late 40's AM-FM console I have ever had that works so well on the FM band. Usually they work up in city, but are weak for here at home. Not so with this GE! You have to make sure you have this radio on the peak for any FM channel, but after that it's a rather clean sounding unit with surprisingly good bass when I set that control to '3', but I'm not going to run it much like that to be easier on the old speaker. I might also give this radio the 'gift' of two more new 6AK5 tubes later on. I replaced the borderline one, but might not be a bad idea to replace the other two if I make this console into a daily driver.
RE: General Electric 417A - Jayce - 09-04-2018
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!
