Now that the electronics have been whipped into shape, it's time to address the sad fact that the little receiver still looks like crap; with large sections of paint loss and corrosion, it's a bit past the point where a simple "touch-up" is possible. Nope, gonna have to strip the little fellow down to his birthday suit before dressing him back up.
I was a little surprised how tough the remaining finish was; my original thought was to chemically strip it, but it took forever for the stripper to soften the finish, so I resorted to brute force: The dual-action (DA) sander. Twenty minutes later, I was looking at bare metal!
As it turned out, I would have had to break out the DA anyway as the rust had pitted the metal quite extensively, so giving up early on using chemical strippers actually saved me some extra effort, not to mention the mess.
While I had the thing in bare metal, I hammered out a few minor dings and dents and straightened the speaker louvers, which always get bent on these radios. When I was happy with it, I prepped the metal for primer and then paint.
Here I took a little artistic liberty and deviated from the original wrinkle finish, mainly because I've had mixed results with it in the past. Instead, I went with a hammertone grey made by Rust-Oleum. I'm reasonably happy with it, though it's not my best effort... I think it'd have turned out better if I had let the garage warm-up for a day beforehand; it was about 10 degrees F outside and maybe 50 degrees F in the garage when I sprayed and it didn't "lay down" for me as well as it has on other projects. I guess it's OK, but I may strip it back down and start over. We'll see.
In the meantime, the label decals have arrived from Radio Daze, so I'm going to let this cure for a few days (if I don't decide to strip it) before applying them and a coat of clear enamel to protect them. Then, once that has a few days to cure, I'll start reassembly. I scored a set of original knobs from Ebay, they should be here by then.
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