[morzh]

Oh gee.....this is an inconvenient radio to deal with, to put it mildly. I thought the AK82 was, but no, it is nervously smoking, having stepped aside and yielded the pedestal to the RCA.

First I noticed that a regulator was practically frozen. Judging from it having the power switch, I thought first it was the volume pot, but then realized it was the tone control. I desoldered it and took it out. My first thought was to inject some Fader Lube deoxit, using my Trolmaster, but then I thought that would not be a good idea without clear understanding what was inside.

The cover of the pot is held by one rivet. Som in order to open it, I put small pieces of fishpaper in each corner, so they would guide the corners of the cover past the box' walls, and rotated the cover around the rivet.

   

You could see the rotating gear and the rheostat; the switch is obscured by the cover, but accessible.
First I put some silicon lube right to the shaft (where the sprocket is visible) and worked it for 10-20 seconds with pliers; it quickly unfroze and after 20 seconds it was easily, without much resistance, rotating with fingers.
Then I used swabs soaked in alcohol to clean the switch contacts and applied a little dab of D5 contact cleaner. Then I cleaned the rheostat with alcohopl (surprisingly clean) and applied a dab of F5 Fader lube to it.

Then I decided to take on the Resistor Board. The first cap, C26, seems to be a mica, juding by the value and by the fact that the capacitance is right on the money. Then of course came the C24, 0.2uF. This thing is on the bottom side. Behind a tangled web of wires. Having the flat tape type leads. So cannot be cut out. After some thinking, using Russian analogs of 4-letter vocabulary and rotating the chassis around several times, I was able to drop it inside.

   

Here it is, out of the chassis. An ugly, ugly creature. I wouldn't even think of restuffing it - it is a piece of tar wrapped in paper.
   

Then I was able to put a new cap inside. Not without using gravity, bending the leads in some intricate ways to guide them to the through rivets they are soldering to, but I was successful.

Oh....and the large inductance, L11, on the same board seems to be open. That's a bummer - this is listed with resistance value instead of inductance, and it is 3K which means a lot of very thin wire.

After this I felt exausted and in need of some beer in my cardiovascular system, which made me stop, then sit down to write this report, and now I am about to move to the beer part.

Cheers!