[mikethedruid]

Last night I connected the speaker to the new wiring harness I made for it, and gave the radio a test. The dial light didn't work, I removed it completely from the radio, de-soldered the wire where it connected to a tube socket inside, and rebuilt the socket. The rubber part inside had deteriorated badly and was stuck do one could not remove the bulb. I finally got the bulb base out after breaking the bulb itself. I made pseudo micarta board by gluing three thicknesses of card stock together with epoxy glue. When it was dry I drilled a little hole through the fake micarta, just big enough to pass the conductor of a new cloth covered 20 gauge wire. I passed that through the little hole, and made a little circle of the wire flat to the board. I then soldered the little circle quickly so as not to burn the board. I then carefully clipped away at the board surrounding the conductor until it was a circle just small enough to easily slip into the metal socket housing. Next I took some heat shrink and ran it right up the wire to the board and shrank it in place. I put back the spring on the wire, slipped the wire into the housing and drew it back, and inserted a new bulb. I connected the wire back to the terminal on the tube socket, and then tested the radio again. The bulb flashed and blew out ! Needless to say the air turned blue for a few minutes, being the old sailor that I am. I then removed the wire again and fired up the radio and checked the voltage. I was read 7 volts, not enough to blow a bulb like that, so I re-installed the wire and socket with a new bulb and tried it again. What do you know, it now worked fine!

After that I set about doing an alignment on the set. The IF went smoothly, it was very near perfect as it was. I then set about the rest of the alignment. The short wave went smoothly enough, but the broadcast band was a major pain! The instructions are NOT as good as they should be, in fact they turned out to be misleading. It took me hours last night, and then again this morning to get things good, but they are now, and frequencies match up at the top and bottom of the dial, and are coming through strong with my signal generator on the lowest output setting. Nest thing is to re-install the chassis into the cabinet and then test the radio on my outside antenna tonight.