[miniman82]

I recently got one of these old military testers, but there seems to be something wrong with it. The bulb marked ‘fuse’ which is actually a type 81 lamp glows very brightly when I try to turn it on, and the line adjust rheostat gets hot. I assumed the power transformer was shorted so I put an AC current meter in place of the bulb and used a variac instead. I got over an amp of current draw which seems excessive, but the rectifiers did start to light up so I’m not sure.

Could it just have a shorted turn inside the transformer?