Posts: 142
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City: Gardendale, AL
I just discovered another problem this thing has. Above half volume, the sound becomes horribly scratchy and it starts popping extremely loudly, even with all the lights off. Is that capacitor related?
Slave to an RCA Victor CTC-25
Posts: 7,283
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Joined: Dec 2009
City: Roslyn Pa
Probably so. As for the wiring on the power transformer remember it's not the original it's a Stancor replacement. Never seen one of those with rubber coated wire. Philco yes Stancor no.
Terry
Posts: 142
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Joined: Mar 2015
City: Gardendale, AL
I also suspect that one of the tubes is questionable. When you phirst turn it on, it sounds phine, but as time goes on, the static starts to creep through more and more. When I phixed my Philco 42-327 back in September, the sound would come in crystal clear, but minutes later, it would completely phade out. I replaced the audio output tube, and it phixed the problem.
Slave to an RCA Victor CTC-25
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If you replace all the electrolytic and paper capacitors as a matter of course, any resistors that test bad, and flaking rubber wiring, you'll probably find you've fixed most or all of the problems. You'll also prevent more problems down the line, so you'll save yourself a lot of troubleshooting. You will have to do an alignment when you're finished, but you probably need to do that anyway.
Replacing the caps is a few evenings' work. You can make it quicker by cutting out the old caps and soldering the new caps to the remaining wire stub. It doesn't look original, but the bright yellow and orange modern caps don't look original anyway. Making it look original by restuffing caps is a lot more work.
Since you don't have a lot of rubber wire, you don't need to desolder the old wires and replace them. On all of the 40's sets I've done, I've ended up desoldering nearly everything, which takes a long time. On radios without rubber wire, I usually just cut the old caps out, which saves a lot of time.
You could have bad coils or other hard-to-replace or had-to-repair parts, but 90% of the restoration of a radio like that is resistors and capacitors. It doesn't sound as though you have bad coils because of the symptoms you write about.
John Honeycutt
Posts: 142
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Joined: Mar 2015
City: Gardendale, AL
I'm done worrying about this radio for a while. I'll probably do a little more work to it this summer, but right now, I have a Philco 38-62 and a Zenith console to worry about.
Slave to an RCA Victor CTC-25