[tbone]

Nice progress. Can’t wait to see the final product.

How do you get your IF cans so shiny. I’ve always cleaned mine, but could never get em like that.

[rfeenstra]

Mothers Mag and Aluminum Polish. Have to be careful, though. It will take the ink off from aluminum capacitors. If yu want to save the original part number and name, you have to avoid the area where they are printed.

[rfeenstra]

Almost completed, waiting for some wire for the speaker cable.

Underside.  All caps stuffed, all resistors original and good. Most of the wire replaced to get rid of the "crispy" wire.  Only the antenna wires and a little bit of the low voltage (filament) wire is original.  the wire that is original has been saturated with clear acrylic plastic corona dope to help insure good insulation.

   


And behold, there is light.

       

[rfeenstra]

Question for Nathan, or whoever has experience with this system.  When the Magnetic Tuning is ON, the flood lights are on to light the preset dial.  I have polished the reflector ring but the amount of light that gets through to light the station identification tags is minimal.  I can see the effect when the ambient lighting is very low, but it is still dim.  The light from the reflector ring has to pass through the band selector plastic, dimming it considerably.  Originally, was the plastic, or whatever it is, that opaque?  Probably hard to know unless you lived back then!

[Ron Ramirez]

I'm not Nathan but I'll give it a go, having had more than my share of these things cross my bench...

Doug Houston could have given you a definitive answer, as he was a youngster when these sets were new. Unfortunately he is no longer with us, so you'll have to put up with my ramblings instead.

I've never seen one of these sets that didn't illuminate the call letter tags very dimly. I think it's just the nature of the beast. Given what (in my opinion) is a poorly designed RF unit, designed with no serious thought as to future repairs, it's a wonder it illuminates at all.

I have no doubt the dial scales and the plastic were lighter when they were new, and have darkened over the decades. I don't think they were ever off-white or yellow, but were always amber. Just a lighter shade of amber. If it really bothers you, you could find some thin opaque white plastic and cut out another shadow mask (the piece behind the dial scale).

I would try to find the brightest LED lamps I could find which will fit, and try those in the call tab illumination sockets.

http://pinballlife.com/

[Ron Ramirez]

Oh, now a question for you, rfeenstra -

I admit that I haven't been following this thread until now. Where did you get wires with tracers for under the chassis?

Edit: Nevermind, I found the answer on page 1 of this thread.

http://www.riwire.com/

18 gauge wouldn't be a problem to replace what was originally 20 gauge wire. Slightly thicker, but then so is the modern reproduction "rated" wire in 20 gauge from Radio Daze and Antique Electronic Supply.

[morzh]

The light will become more noticeable once the chassis is inside the cabinet. I cannot complain, they illuminate quite enough.

[jcassity]

a little late to the show but i often mention going to a junk yard and buying a vehicle computer / engine bay harness will suffice for all the wire colors you need and sometimes the tracers on these are dots or dashes and sometimes the tracers are solid lines.

in all cases, automotive harness wiring will exceed all requirements when used on a radio especially when we speak to insulation ratings and abilities to mitigate affects of oils, temperature, water and UV..

sometimes if you are really in the know ,, you will run across "special wires" like resistance wires which act as shunts for ammeters (not the fuse link wiring), or braided tinned copper and various shielded wires. Fuse link wiring is a really great match to a lot of radio wires where they are solid rubber coated but rarely come in colors other than blue, black, green or yellow.,,and they are typically only a certain length. These are actually similar to resistance wires ,, and can be useful if they match what your doing.

the shielded wires i have found would make great replacements for those we see in volume controls i run across where the external shield is soldered to chassis.

in most all instances as well, automotive wiring will be "flex" type.

for the radio purist, this is not an option.
for the person who wants to make the radio future proof and match well enough with the idea that the radio is being upgraded , it may be a choice.

to store wire from an auto harness,, i have consolidated it by simple means.

use a small bucket with lid or kitty litter container with lid.
punch in holes into the lid with a 1/8'' drill bit or just a small punch/lether awl

bundle the whole harness and drop it into your bucket in a coil fashion.

feed each wire up into the bottom side of the lid and pig tail it on the top side
you should have enough holes for all your wires plus room for growth.

put the lid on.

when you need wire, you pull it up  and cut off what you need.

when i ran into instances where i had duplicate colors, i would simply solder them together / heatshrink and make it one longer wire.  doing a western union splice is best for this task as it  keeps the overall diameter of the wire nearly the same without a huge bump showing.

i have done up several of these as christmas gits over the past few years..... for those DIY types on my gift list.  its usually under 20$ and a gift that really shows its usefulness over time.

here is an example of a small harness i had lying around which seemed to coil up and fit will into a coffee can.

my wire container is an old 2gal round container that i dont really like so i will someday use a kitty litter container
the reason i say kitty litter container is that it can lie on its side on a shelf, lid facing out,, stows away in a very small footprint on the shelf,,, which is far superior to individual wire rolls / reels which take up lots of space.

[jcassity]

i ran across a post on some other thread where the person said they use single conductor copper wire as its easy to work with instead of the multi-conductor flex equal version.

i somewhat disagree and agree however...
you strip and twist the end and tin,, it becomes a solid end so its equal.

i always pre-tin the wires before i j hook and insert them into the radio connection. this reduces the time required on the part with heat.
i also use flux which a lot of people think the flux core in solder is good enough. using flux cuts your time on point with heat by more than 50%.

[morzh]

I do not have a clear preference, but:

>>>i somewhat disagree and agree however...
you strip and twist the end and tin,, it becomes a solid end so its equal.

Kinda. When you twist and tin the end of a multi-strand wire it becomes very stiff and, if needs to be wrapped around something, it is very difficult.
Single conductor wire, on the other hand, being a solid piece of copper, which at these diameters is quite ductile, will wrap quite easily.

[rfeenstra]

Yes Ron, the tracer wire did come from Rhode Island Wire.  They have quite a selection.  It is un-tinned, 18 gauge, stranded.  Total diameter is a bit more than the 20 gauge from Radio Daze, but less than the 18 gauge from them.  They will custom braid your own wire if you wish.  That way you could use 20 gauge, 600 volt wire.  Cost and delivery time being the constraining factor.  I'm looking for an old maypole braiding machine to do my own wire!

[rfeenstra]

As far as the illumination is concerned, I'll make a judgement after it is installed in the cabinet, as was suggested.  I've got my eye out for some kind of fluorescent or led ring that I could put between the shadow mask and the dial.  Then again....too much work and not very original!

[morzh]

Use amber LEDs, this will light it as original as it gets.
Get old bad lamp bases, after cracking and discarding the glass, solder in the LED, put a resistor and a diode in series....done.

[rfeenstra]

All tubes checked, installed, and slowly powered up.  Stations all across the dial, though low volume and distorted.  At least I had something to work with.  I discovered the wiper contact on the treble control had a low resistance short to ground.  This caused the bias on the audio driver tube to vary from -14v to ov as I turned the selectivity control.  Fixed that and the radio works great... almost.  One dead band (1.5-7.6 mHz band).  The oscillator dies and there is total silence.  Before I reassembled the tuner chassis I had checked all coils and all measured ok.  I hope I don't have to remove and disassemble the tuner chassis again to find the problem!  It's a pain and it would be difficult to test without reassembly.  Otherwise, it tuned up great and performs admirably.  It's nice to have a signal first shot out of the box.  It gives you something to easily troubleshoot.  I think this will perform as good or better than my Scott 16.  The magnetic tuning is interesting and works quite well.  Once it locks into a station, you have to tune quite far off to get it to lock into the next station.

   

[Nathan Slingerland]

You're doing a great job! Sparkling clean work.