Tuesday, August 15, 2017

New Life to All American Five - Part 3: Patient Survives.

Where we started two days ago...

Done.  


The rest of the repairs were comprised of changing out all of the paper capacitors with modern mylar film components.  This is a pretty boring process and I'll spare you the blow-by-blow description, suffice it to say that I replace one at a time (unless one cap is blocked by another - in that case, two at a time...) and test the set after replacing each one.  This isn't so much to see if the new part improved performance as much as it is to catch any mistakes - I must have been paying attention while working on this one because I didn't screw anything up.

The cosmetic "restoration" was primarily just cleaning 70 years worth of crud off of everything and replacing the speaker cloth.  The veneer and original lacquer finish weren't terrible, so I opted to refresh rather than refinish it.  That's the nice thing about lacquer - you can clean, repair and "reflow" it - what I like to call a "scuff and blast".  I prefer to do this whenever possible, not only because it's a hell of a lot less work, but it usually looks more appropriate when some of the scars of age show through.

Here's a short video clip of the set in action:


So, that's that.  As you can see in the background, my bench is utter chaos and I really need to spend a few days reorganizing the junk.  Don't think I'll be blogging about that - but my plans for my next project are starting to gel.  I'll drop a hint because I'm kind of excited about it:  It'll be a combination of traditional radio technology and software definition - stay tuned!

73 - Steve N8NM

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