Late 1950s Magnavox Console Stereo

[Reece]

I don't know the construction of your bad idler wheel, but what some have done is to remove all the old rubber and take the wheel to the hardware store and look through their selection of O-rings. Best would be to find a fat one that fits on the now exposed metal of the wheel. The fact that the diameter of the wheel may change doing this is not important as the wheel is only an intermediary between the motor shaft and the turntable. Once you find an O-ring that works, if needed, with the ring in place and properly aligned, carefully superglue it to the wheel, being careful to keep the glue only in the area of where the ring contacts the wheel. It will wick down into that space. You don't want any on the outer surface, obviously.
While you're there, pick up a tube of light grease and a can of light oil for refurbing the changer mechanism.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by Reece

I don't know the construction of your bad idler wheel, but what some have done is to remove all the old rubber and take the wheel to the hardware store and look through their selection of O-rings. Best would be to find a fat one that fits on the now exposed metal of the wheel. The fact that the diameter of the wheel may change doing this is not important as the wheel is only an intermediary between the motor shaft and the turntable. Once you find an O-ring that works, if needed, with the ring in place and properly aligned, carefully superglue it to the wheel, being careful to keep the glue only in the area of where the ring contacts the wheel. It will wick down into that space. You don't want any on the outer surface, obviously.
While you're there, pick up a tube of light grease and a can of light oil for refurbing the changer mechanism.

The idler used in that changer is not one that could repaired with a O-ring. It's a totally different type of idler wheel with a molded tire on a small diameter cast aluminum or pot metal wheel. I can see why the firm would want the kind of money to refurbish the original.

[Captainclock]

Originally Posted by dieseljeep

The idler used in that changer is not one that could repaired with a O-ring. It's a totally different type of idler wheel with a molded tire on a small diameter cast aluminum or pot metal wheel. I can see why the firm would want the kind of money to refurbish the original.

Yeah, it definitely had a lot of rubber on it and about 95% of the rubber is still intact on the original idler tire and the other 5% is crumbled off due to the rubber being dried up.

Yeah the Voice of Music website had this particular idler tire for $28 plus the shipping costs of returning the original idler tire to them and then the shipping costs to ship the new one which brought the price to nearly $40 which is way more expensive than I was willing to pay for this part.

I mean when I ordered the drive tire for an old RCA 45 RPM Changer that I restored for someone that part was only $10 plus the return cost (which was way cheaper.)

[Captainclock]

Well I received the "new" turntable from Dave (dieseljeep) today and I ended up using the turntable he sent me on my Magnavox to get it up and running instead of using it for parts because I figured out that the cartridge that I needed off of it was riveted onto the holder that secured it to the tonearm so there wasn't anyway I could remove it from the holder so I just used the screw from the original turntable that was missing on the turntable that Dave sent me in the mail and screwed the idler tire down and then swapped out the old LP needle with a new one I had laying around put it back together, swapped out the power connector from the original turntable that came with my Magnavox onto the new one turntable as the new turntable's connector wasn't the same as the one that came with my original turntable to begin with then hooked up the turntable secured it into place and then popped a record on and let it play and boy does it sound good!
The only thing I noticed though was that the stereo had some popping, snapping and staticy noises coming out of the left channel so I took the amp out of the console and recapped it (replaced all of the coupling capacitors except for one of them) and hooked it back up and then turned it on again and it still was making nosies out of the left channel, then I turned it off and then turned it back on again and then the noises went away and now it plays fine.
But what I found odd was that the nosies only happened when it was on phono mode only, when it was on radio mode it played just fine.
So I don't know what the deal was with that.
Anyways All I need to do is replace the crossover caps on the speakers which are 16 MFD 25 Volts Bi-polar electrolytics for crossover purposes, and I saw that Radio Shack has a 10 MFD 50 Volts Bi-Polar crossover cap for 97 cents, would that be a good replacement for the original crossover caps?