Back at the spring ETF I grabbed a less scary RA-103 chassis with a good tuner for $15....It's been kicking around for a LONG time as has the dismantled set. I finally got sick of all the bits for this thing taking up room and fixed it. The new chassis was also a mouse house, but not nearly as stinky and rusty. It's tuner was good and the HV cage cover was also present. Another benefit of the 'new' chassis was that someone gave it a crummy partial re-cap. They missed all the lytics, and did a lot of stupid things with the papers. I had to re-replace about half a dozen film caps since they did hair brained stuff like replacing .005 caps with .01, .1 with .15, installing a 200V cap to replace a 400V, 600V replacing the 1000V sweep caps, and the like....I left a few goofy but functional things like the series .22 caps (forming a .11) to replace a .1, and the series .01s replacing .005's. The pre-recap was helpful overall. Oddly enough the person who dumped the partially recapped chassis pulled every tube except for the most valuable one: the horizontal output (the HV rect also came with the chassis). The set had a LOT of mouse chewed wires in the main harness and under the 5U4s (which I suspect was part of the reason the previous owner's resto was aborted), and those were a pain to deal with. All the wires that had insulation damaged in the center I ended up replacing with ones from the other chassis, which thankfully had mouse chew on different wires (tisk tisk, the rodent family has such poor consistency
) Many of the wires chewed on the ends got heat shrink wrap over the damage....At the end on a couple of lone wires that got munched I just said 'Fu#k it' and bent their bare spots away from anything they could short to. After touching up the old recap and fixing the wires came changing the lytics, and then reinstalling the speaker and eye tube harnesses (previous owner clipped them out for god only knows why). I cleaned the tuner and reinstalled my original Dumont CRT, then remembered I had cannibalized the transformer and plug off this sets speaker to replace the missing ones on the stromberg. I grabbed a Philco split chassis parts chassis and found the right transformer for the output tube, and a plug that was close enough to work and crudely grafted them onto the speaker that came with the cabinet.
I was half expecting a big explosion or electrical fire on power up (it is hard to be sure one's found all the mouse damage), but was instead greeted by the B+ relay working, a horizontal line that bloomed into a raster, followed by sound and picture. Surprisingly it synced without adjustment, and the only major annoyance was the sound alignment not coinciding with clear picture (which I fixed)...Also I accidentally left a resistor disconnected while fixing the mouse damage which left the contrast control inoperative till I found it.
It still needs a clear dial scale, all but one of the knobs, a tuning eye tube that works, and a refinish, but I think otherwise it is done. I mannaged to get it in the cabinet, but still need to tweak the sweep adjustments. The CRT has ion burn, don't test great and had a brightener, but it is reasonably bright without it and looks okay so I'll keep it in till it dies (I've got a good 12LP4 waiting). Incidentally I left a sub standard tube in it...See link for details:
http://www.videokarma.org/showthread...24#post3190724
Tomorrow I've got to dial in the sweep, replace the power cord, get the back on and hit is with some howards restor-a-finish (this pig needs lipstick, damn it!
).
I'm debating what to do with the other RA-103 chassis....Sell the parts, dump the whole chassis, or strip the chassis and keep the parts (the smell makes me want to dismiss keeping much of it). I'd be happy to trade my parts chassis or anything currently mounted to it for the knobs and or clear dial scale and or eye tube. Any takers?
Carcass pic(k)s below.
