04-25-2015, 02:36 PM
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.
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