I worked on a Motorola 5A7 portable AC-DC set last year. Sounds a lot like what you are dealing with now. Man was it tight in there! At least I didn't have to deal with rubber wiring. Good luck with it.
I recently redid a little RCA portable and it was a nightmare. It was a job for a friend and the set still doesn't play very well. I have a suspicion that it played crappy when it was new. I recapped, re-resistored and rewired all the bad wiring. I will never work on one again.
I ain't rewiring it except those wires that I touch and they are falling apart.
But I suspect these small radios with their tiny speakers and nonexistent to negative acoustical properties of their boxes have to sound bad.
I guess this is for kitchen time news; otherwise you go at least for something like 38-12 type.
So good news is the coils are all OK and tubes are good.
Now your power switch, part of the volume pot, does not make, stays open.
I am not sure it is a good idea trying to fix it given the state of wires around and space constraints. I think for the time being I will short it.
PS. Man, clean the dang asbestos off of it next time
It is bad enough this thing can kill ya electrically.
I finished recap, checked resistor (most good, some out of tolerance but from the sch POV is acceptablebonsidering changing them is next to a torture and risks major rewiring after that) - reconnected the electrolytic cap I had to restuff (I did not restuff others - too tight, but the lytic I had to - the distance between wires is such that I do need a long tube to hold them caps), brought it on variac, heard static, rotated the shaft....PLENTY of stations, remote, local...
This little gizmo of an antenna at the back is good!
That's fine, I had some fun, plus this is the first philco 40s AA5 I fixed.....gaining experience.
Took me .... 3 evenings, not even full ones....has it been a regular chassis with some room and no rubber wiring I'd probably be done the next day after I started.
Buy that pot I wrote you about, just ask if they know it is in working order.
That looks familiar, Philco sure didn't believe in wasting sheet metal in the 1940s, just about all of their AC/DC sets are packed like a sardine can The 46-1201s are worse but at least those did not use wire with perishable insulation. On my 42-327 I had to replace the wiring in both IF cans, along with any other rubber covered wire. For some odd reason Canadian Philco sets used cloth covered wire from 1939-42, except for in assemblies like IF cans, but Rogers built sets used rubber/gutta percha covered wire going back to the early 1930s. You just have to deal with it one step at a time, one component and one terminal at a time. One thing that helps is the under chassis diagrams that Philco had in their manuals showing parts placement.
Regards
Arran
(This post was last modified: 05-22-2014, 09:22 PM by Arran.)
most wire survived, some even feels pliable and did not crack.
Somehow it is mostly light colored wire.
Dark wire crumbled.
I replaced two of them.
There are no chassis digram in Riders for PT69, so I either guessed or traced....loctals and lack of space, so the panels cannot even be seen well, make for nasty tracing.
Electrolytics had 2uF in each of them two, so if I wanted to power it before recappping, I would likely, with buzz and all, heard some stations.
(This post was last modified: 05-22-2014, 09:28 PM by morzh.)
Kirk, this is, again, an AA5, an AC-DC set that is not insulated from the Mains.
Do not operate it in the basement, near any water pipe (in the kitchen) or lying in a bathtub
Better yet, buy an isolation transformer.
Also a GFCI outlet helps.
(This post was last modified: 05-22-2014, 09:32 PM by morzh.)
(Mark's is ".net").
They are not hard to order at all, the single thing I do not like there they have $20 minimum order before shipping (the pot is $6). But I am sure you could find something else you are looking for there.
Mike.
(This post was last modified: 05-23-2014, 07:14 AM by morzh.)
So it's the switch that's shot not the volume control pot? I'm sure that someone around here has a junker Philco with a control, with the right switch on the back end, the control itself isn't too important as the switch can be transplanted to the existing one. If the original switch isn't physically broken it may be salvageable by taking it off and giving it a good soaking in some solvents, varsol (or paint thinner, naptha, gasoline), alcohol, lacquer thinner, brake cleaner, just don't use lacquer thinner in the pot.
Regards
Arran
