[Nick3092]

Nick, next time to make removing the insides from the electrolytics easier, heat the can with a heat gun. This will melt the tar and the insides will just slide right out.

I have an old wine cork screw, I screw it inside the cap stuffing, heat it with a heatgun, and then pull. The more you heat it the easier it is, just to hold it you might need a glove.

The corskscrew idea is neat.  Although just the thought of heating it gives me flash backs of hot melted tar all over the first time I tried to restuff a bakelite block.  My own fault for letting it get too hot.  Since then, I found it's generally just as easy and less mess to chisel out the tar on the blocks using a small jewelers screwdriver.  I can just vacuum up the solid chunks with my shop vac and clean out the remainder in the block with q-tips and thinner.

Well I think I now have all of the caps and resistors in the IF, power, and rear/audio sections replaced.  I almost forgot about that capacitor pack on the top side in the IF section.  I took that off and pulled the pack out of the can.  I was able to remove the original wires fairly easily.  In the past with these capacitor packs, I often put them on a small PCB.  But this one was a pretty straightforward series connection, with a couple taps in between caps.  So I found i could lay them all side by side, zip tie them together, solder the leads together, and then reattach the original wires to them.
   

I then took the whole thing, wrapped it up in parchment paper (I figure that makes a decent insulator, considering is coated with silicone) folded the back end up and taped it to make a pouch, and slid it back in the can.  The original pack had a ground wire soldered to the side of the can.  But It only grounds through 2 litttle spring clips, and I'm not sure how much I trust that.  So I ran a ground wire from the new pack I made out under the chassis and soldered it to a ground lug on a near by bakelite block.

The parts in the rear/audio section took me a bit longer than I anticipated.  They shoved a fair amount of crap back there, and there was also a loom of wires laying right over everything.  I couldn't take pictures to work off, because it was so cramped and I couldn't get a good angle.  So I had to draw out my own little diagram and tracing what went where before even starting to work.  Putting the new caps in was a little easier given their smaller size.

Tomorrow I have some things i need to do inthe morning, then sit down and watch the Packer game.  Tomorrow afternoon/evening I'll take the rest of the "tower" off the front, so I can work on getting the RF chassis out to work on.  Just the thought of that section is making me nervous.  I was second guessing my work on the audio section as it is.  That RF section looks like an even bigger mess.