CTC9 Power on success, atleast for now

[Jonathan]

Welp, after a long time, after I changed one 160uF electrolytic and a few others as well as some black beauties, I power on the chassis for the first time connected to a speaker from a 17" black and white RCA, I got static! Woohoo!, then I tune to channel 3 and I get some really clear audio!! I'm quite happy!

One thing I'm not happy about is that when you turn it on, there is a slight inrush and the chassis vibrates to the strong beat of 60Hz. Is this normal, drawing as much power as it does? It does say it draws 375W, but this'll cause the chassis to vibrate?

Then I turned it on again and I noticed a huge pop and a spark by the power transformer. After careful inspection, I saw that the inrush thermister was replaced by a component lead that heated up so much that it exploded! It was odd to see it, as a fusable link, be blown, but everything else is fine. By the looks of the wiring terminals, it was badly soldered on as a quick fix. This could be the reason of the chassis vibrating, but I'm not sure.

The Sams calls for an inrush thermister that is 79 ohms cold and .4 ohms hot. It's connected in between the AC line filter and the power transformer primary. It probably sees atleast 3 to 3.5A operating. Obviously, it NEEDS this inrush thermister for reliable and safe operation. When I was constructing an amplifier power supply, I had a 2kVA toroid made for use as a power transformer. It drew so much that it would pop the breaker instantly. I got it to work with a timed solid state 20A relay and a 20W resistor where it wouldn't blow anything.

In this case, what kind of inrush thermister should I use? I suppose an NTC would be the right choice (because a PTC would be low resistance cold and high resistance hot?), but should I use a 100 ohm NTC or string two 47 ohm NTC's together?

Thanks.

Jonathan