04-17-2018, 02:24 AM
Ed;
I guess the engineers at RCA-Victor, in Montreal (and or C.G.E in Toronto) were a little more kind then the ones in Camden, N.J, the loop antenna on the A-30 has a three pronged plug and socket, the same goes for the pushbutton bank, the speaker cable does exit a hole in the top of the chassis but it has a brass grommet around it so the edges are not sharp, power cord had a rubber grommet where it exited the chassis but it has dried up and slipped out. In the A-30, and other Canadian RCA sets from the early 1940s, the pushbutton bank was mounted to the inside of the cabinet and not to the chassis, however you do still need to reconnect it to the chassis to operate the radio, it has the three pinned plug on the end of a cable on one end of the bank for the phonograph socket, and three tipped wires that you need to plug in individually into the other end to connect the bank to the front end of the radio. It probably would have been better to have the pushbutton bank mounted to the chassis, but there really wasn't anywhere to mount it.
What is not nice about the next set up the line, the A-22 is that the cable for the magic eye also exists a brass grommeted hole in the top of the chassis, but the cable is routed right next to the two hottest tubes in the radio, the 5Y4 and the 6F6, which causes the wire to harden up and flake apart, creating another opportunity for the full B+ voltage to short to ground. In sets like this I will often replace the 5Y4G with a 5Y4GT which is just over half as tall as the shouldered G type, so it will not touch the cable, and it's behind the 6F6 tube so you can't really see it from the back. I don't have to worry about this in the A-30, the tube layout is different, the power tubes are at one end of the chassis rather then the center, and there is no magic eye. even though the basic chassis box is the same dimensions for both the A-30 and A-22 the layout was almost completely different for some reason, even though the number of sockets mounted to it was the same. I think that the one reason might be that the A-22 used IF transformers that were almost four times the physical size as the A-30, the IF cans in your set are the same as the A-30 I am working on. Why they they made such choices is a mystery since I doubt whether there was a performance advantage in using the big cans over the smaller ones, and you would think that economy of scale would have dictated using one type rather then two or more.
Regards
Arran
I guess the engineers at RCA-Victor, in Montreal (and or C.G.E in Toronto) were a little more kind then the ones in Camden, N.J, the loop antenna on the A-30 has a three pronged plug and socket, the same goes for the pushbutton bank, the speaker cable does exit a hole in the top of the chassis but it has a brass grommet around it so the edges are not sharp, power cord had a rubber grommet where it exited the chassis but it has dried up and slipped out. In the A-30, and other Canadian RCA sets from the early 1940s, the pushbutton bank was mounted to the inside of the cabinet and not to the chassis, however you do still need to reconnect it to the chassis to operate the radio, it has the three pinned plug on the end of a cable on one end of the bank for the phonograph socket, and three tipped wires that you need to plug in individually into the other end to connect the bank to the front end of the radio. It probably would have been better to have the pushbutton bank mounted to the chassis, but there really wasn't anywhere to mount it.
What is not nice about the next set up the line, the A-22 is that the cable for the magic eye also exists a brass grommeted hole in the top of the chassis, but the cable is routed right next to the two hottest tubes in the radio, the 5Y4 and the 6F6, which causes the wire to harden up and flake apart, creating another opportunity for the full B+ voltage to short to ground. In sets like this I will often replace the 5Y4G with a 5Y4GT which is just over half as tall as the shouldered G type, so it will not touch the cable, and it's behind the 6F6 tube so you can't really see it from the back. I don't have to worry about this in the A-30, the tube layout is different, the power tubes are at one end of the chassis rather then the center, and there is no magic eye. even though the basic chassis box is the same dimensions for both the A-30 and A-22 the layout was almost completely different for some reason, even though the number of sockets mounted to it was the same. I think that the one reason might be that the A-22 used IF transformers that were almost four times the physical size as the A-30, the IF cans in your set are the same as the A-30 I am working on. Why they they made such choices is a mystery since I doubt whether there was a performance advantage in using the big cans over the smaller ones, and you would think that economy of scale would have dictated using one type rather then two or more.
Regards
Arran