Electronic Restoration Fun- 1947 Rogers "Chairside" Radio!

hi everyone and welcome to another episode of mr. Carlson's lab in this video together we're going to repair and restore a Rogers chair side rail which is right behind me here now when I went to pick up the radio it really is quite decieving night no matter how you take a picture of this thing it just looks bigger in pictures than it is in reality so I got to the place and I'm like that's the radio which just added to the neat factor the radio is so small the entire cabinet and everything fits on the bench right behind me here knows to move out of the way so you can take a look at it so the cabinets in great condition the grill cloth looks great really hasn't been torn at by a cat or anything like that on the top there's a little door that allows access to the radio so you can put your coffee or your paper or something on that again the thing is designed to sit by a chair so what we're going to do is we're going to bring this thing back to life again this thing is going to operate the way it did when it rolled off of the factory floor maybe even just a little bit better because we're using modern components so I'm going to take you through the entire restoration procedure with me step-by-step so let's get started here's the closer look at the radio if I open the lid up you can see everything in here looks really really nice so the dial glass has no cracks and that is kind of common for chairside radios especially when the lids have been left open because the dog glass faces up it's very easy for somebody to rest their hand on it or you know to drop something on and it cracks the dial glass so that's really nice to see that the dial glass is in good condition the knobs are also in very good condition these types of knobs decay when they're left in the Sun or any type of UV light for any extended period of time I have some very good examples of these knobs on they're just falling apart on some other radios that we are going to do some restorations on here in the future so I'll show you what these things look like here down the road they've just absolutely decay they almost you can almost grab them and squeeze them and they just break into pieces it's really bizarre so you can tell that the top has been closed and everything's been nice and protected as you can see the grill cloth is in really nice condition dirt down here cleaned off or anything yet so all in all the real looks really really nice so onto the backside now I'll turn the radio around and we'll get inside the thing see what we're up against here you are sitting right beside me at the bench so let's take the back off this thing and see what's inside I can guarantee there's probably gonna be a lot of dust I can see lots of fuzz down the bottom here definitely tell these screws have been out a time or two I'm gonna do my best to remain out of the shot this is a very wide angle lens so I'm gonna have to stretch here a little bit and I did notice that there was one larger Robertson over here so I got a different screwdriver for that one lastly that in there the wires out and we're in and yes there is a lot of dust in the bottom I'm gonna have to vacuum that out I don't want to inhale any of that so it's looking really nice inside what I'll do is I'll move the camera a little closer and we'll see what it takes to actually get the radio out of this thing in order to get the radio out of the case here looks like there's a bunch of things that have to be done first of all I'll have to de solder the wires from the speaker here so there it looks like there is enough wire left here actually that I could just reach rim it it does look pretty rough down here so what I'm going to do is I'll just cut that off right now what I'll do in the end is just reconnect them right there and right there so these are out of the way I did remove the knobs from the top very easy process one set screw in the actual knob itself right there and the two upper knobs so you just undo this set screw and they just pulled directly off there's really no rocket science to getting the knobs off on these radios so both of them have a set screw and then the the portion that's underneath this one here it just pulls directly off so they are indexed that one sits in the top so you can't get the bottom ring Oh without removing that little screw there you don't remove it you just really loosen it off and then this thing will just you know pop right off like so now looking at the underside here I see a bunch of screws here there's a nice vacuum tube legend here which is kind of nice there's two screws here holding the chassis in and there's another two screws here but I look up here and I see that there's a filter here for the light so to make the light shine uniform on the dial but there's a needle that goes underneath here and then as you move the dial that needle moves back and forth under here so if I was to try and remove this chassis without loosening this off I might damage this and it looks like somebody may have already done that I see a little bit of a split here so the thing to do I can't get a screwdriver in here but it looks like I can get a screwdriver in here so what I'll do is I'll remove the dial string from this you can see it's designed to be removed from here and then I'll remove this screw and slide it forward nut should allow me to get this needle out of here without causing any damage so the first thing I'll do is I'll just loosen this off right now so all you do is you pull the dial string forward it's just kind of bent in here like so and then in the end I'll have to put this back on and align it again which will be a bit of a pain but you do what you got to do so there it is now this is loose but you can see it's now hitting this so you know this is all loose oh let's see if I can get this out without yeah it doesn't look like it so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to undo this screw here and see if I can slide that filter forward just a little bit looks like it wants to pop right down so this should be relatively easy so if I move this all the way over here hopefully I can get this forward enough that this will actually pop out it feels like it wants to you can see that they're just like so so that came out relatively easy without damaging anything here so what we'll do is I'll put that screw back in here just so it holds this in place properly so that nothing really gets damaged that back up in here just snug doesn't have to be tight I also want to move this needle out of the way so I don't bump it and bend it or anything like that so I'll put this over here bench since the knobs have been removed it doesn't really look like there's a whole lot more so these two screws here and those two screws up there and it looks like somebody's done the double sized Robertson thing again there probably have to get a longer Robertson to fit in that one there grab this one here I guess okay and I'll take one out down here as well I'll get the difficult ones out so I can imagine I'm most likely going to need to hold this up because it's gonna want to fall so what I'll do is I'll remove this one first and then I'll go after this one here I think this is the smaller one I think it's to different size where Harvard sends here so I'll just do this and you can see it already wants to fall I see how I'm just holding it here and there it is so what I'll do now has a cover on the bottom it feels it does so what I'll do is I'll just move this out of the way put this down here for now so I'll get the cabinet out of the way and I'll reposition the camera and we'll take a closer look at the chassis see what we're up against humming excited to see what's underneath that cover so what do you think did the last repair men do a bachi job or did he do an okay job place your bets now let's take a look at the chassis and see what the engineers at Rogers were thinking of when they put this thing together now already I can tell you they used a non-standard set of tubes in this all-american five design usually what they did way back when is they would have all octal Zoar all seven pin miniatures or whatever they you know have all of these types of tubes in here which are called lock tool tubes and I'll explain the difference here in just a moment but they're kind of have a mix of both of these which is kind of odd but maybe they were just trying to get rid of stock or they were experimenting with some new tubes now the verdicts are really out with that kind of an interesting design we'll take a look at the bottom side here so when I say octal tubes they're much like 6l sixes or six V sixes it's a tube with an index pin you can see a little index right here that index right there that's so you can only put the tube in one way sometimes they don't fully populate all the pins if the pins don't aren't needed in the base they'll just leave them open like so so in order to put one of these things back in if you can't see it what you did you just put it on top of the socket and rotate the tube like so and it'll fall in and see like that and you just give it a bit of a push and it's in the socket now the question I get a lot is can you touch the glass on vacuum tubes yes you can it's just standard glass nothing's gonna happen to the glass now you don't want to touch these when they're hot this particular tube here is probably the tube that gets the hottest on this entire chassis this is the audio output tube and it's running in Class A so this thing gets as hot as hell and you don't want to be touching it with your finger because if this tube is in service and you did that with your finger you would have a burn on your finger that's how hot this vacuum tube gets as a really large heater in there and then of course when the tube is functioning and working is drawing current the actual the entire tube gets extremely hot this is a tube that you would not want to come in contact with this one here would be the second hottest than I would imagine the rest of them are you know they get quite warm so these two tubes here are doing a lot of work this one here is taking the line cord and changing it to direct current so this is half wave rectifier tube here 3505 so I'll just pull this one out and show that to you there it is 35 Z dirty now a lot of people get the temptation to take a radio like this and plug it in just to see if it's gonna work see if it's gonna hum or do whatever really bad idea if you don't know the state where you don't have a current limited supply because the first tube that gets it is this one here if the filter capacitors on the bottom portion of this chassis are shorted and I'll show you what those look like here when we get into the bottom if they're shorted it immediately destroys this tube and you're buying another tube so what it does is it blows a bonding wire off of the cathode it's a little bonding wire that runs from the cathode to pin see if I can rub some of the dirt off here so we can take a look inside so let's see if we can see the little bonding wire in there there it is right there you can see it running off to this side so it's unfortunately it's under this getter compound now let's see if I can get any closer yeah you can see if I don't get something to point to it so right there that little wire that's running off just like this these white wires here are the filaments and that little wire right there is what connects the cathode which is that little pipe in the center see that little pipe that's a part that glows and that emits electrons okay so what it does is when that you can see the little bonding wire in there it right there running down here right so that little bonding wire just blows off it acts as a fuse so a lot of people wonder why these radios don't have fuses there it is over colonel just blow that thing right off that's why these things were usually never fitted with fuses now if you want to make it safer and for other reasons you can add a fuse in here there's no problem but for the radio itself that's instant destruction if you have a bad capacitor in here so it's never a good idea to pull one of these things in if you don't know what state again if a cap is shorted you'll be replacing this tube right away so this tube here changes the line cord right here to from AC because you know plugged into your AC outlet changes it to direct current and powers up the radio this is known as a transformer list type set so a lot of the times the chassis on this radio can be hot so whenever you're servicing something like this you always have to have an isolation transformer to protect yourself you can never ever work on this type of transformer Lissette without an isolation transformer or you're really putting yourself at risk if you have the line cord plugged in backwards and you attach a piece of test gear to this thing you'll blow the line cord on this thing either open or you'll blow the lead off your test gear or something like that so it can be very scary you got to be very careful with something like that so if you're following along and you're working on one of these things you're doing so at your own risk you definitely want to know what you're doing before you're gonna start working on a transformer Lissette there are much more dangerous to work on in that respect than a chassis with a transformer jassi's with transformers usually have elevated B+ so they have elevated high voltages much higher than these so you know yeah I guess you pick your poison right so that one's gonna be a little bit you know what that's a different explanation I'll get into that when we start working on transformer sets as well so these tubes here this one here is in the mixer tube so it's an oscillator and a mixer this one here is the if' amp so it's basically acting as an amplifier between these two I have transformers this is a detector which is basically a bunch of diodes and a tryout inside which is acting as an audio amplifier for the audio output tube the audio output tube here which is a 50 L six drives this transformer this transformer drives as a speaker why do they need a transformer between this tube in the speaker well vacuum tubes are high impedance devices and audio and up speakers are low impedance devices so need something to transform that impedance and that's what that thing does right there tuning capacitor right here so one section will be the oscillator and then one section will be tuning the antenna so that's how these things work that's why they have two sections so both of these will have to be aligned same with this down here as well looks like it has a phono input on the jack on the back here a phono jack on the back if you want to say that whether this plating definitely needs to be cleaned off it's going all yellow not good to inhale any type of dust or anything from this you got to be very very careful so these jassi's are usually coated and that's why they change color so this is the bottom side and it looks like somebody's been in here and they didn't put the screws back in here and here for some reason why I don't know maybe they lost the screws or somebody was just asleep at the wheel so it won't be too incredibly hard to get in this chassis so what I'll do is I'll remove these screws again what do you think hack job inside or do you think it's gonna be nice I'm gonna tell you the truth about ninety percent of the time when I hear somebody say that it's been repaired by a professional it looks like something barf done to the chassis I'd give it about a 10% chance that you know somebody with with care I guess you could say worked on something like this it's not really common so I don't know we'll see do you think it's the 90 or the 10% let's find out turn this thing upside down like so this wire out of the way and the big reveal Wow you know it's not doing not doing too bad it's all original lots of wax capacitors all of these need to go all the capacitors will be leaky and he said it was repaired at some time this one here's blown its end open this is the reason that you really don't want to be plugging these things before you know what's going on this has actually blown the end off the cap here I would think that maybe this capacitor here was replaced that's about the shiniest one so yeah that's probably the one that was replaced and here's usually the filter cap that goes right that you know when these things were first put together run for a long period of time these ones whoever the first thing to to go so it's looking all original you know so there's not a whole lot of tampering I really like that so I'm going to say that the tech that put this in all this a nice big shiny glob of solder here so there was some testing and that runs to this black wire right here so that I think it does it looks like it yep so this is most likely what they replaced here and I have to say that the tech did a nice job so this is that 10% congratulations to the guy that actually worked on this because you know usually these things are taped up with black tape and thrown in the corner you know people don't clip them in like this they don't put them under the clip again mind you he did forget to put these screws back in you know so there's a bit of a discrepancy there but other than that you know it's looking okay this capacitors it looks like it has a huge split and it as well I can see that big split there there's a split in that line this on here looks like it has its end blown open we'll take a closer look at all this stuff here shortly so it's all in all like I mean it's not bad surprising very surprising now I was gonna show you the lock ttle tubes now locked those have got an interesting way of removing you're supposed to remove them in a certain way see this little dimple on the side of a locked ol tube the difference between a lockdown and octal is these ones will lock into a socket so they're really good for mobile application so for car radios and things like that in order to release the lock you bend the tube towards the dimple and it should pop just pop out like so it really didn't make a popping noise but they pop out and you see how there's a OH ring in the bottom here that ring holds this tube in so what you do is you align the tube up okay and then you give it a push your clicks in so you never want to rock these and pull them out you always pull them towards the dimple so you always have to find the dimple on the vacuum tube so this one here has a dimple right here so in order to get this one out we want to pull that towards the dimple and you can see how it releases the tube and then to put it back in you simply you can align the dimple up to the same portion again to that little rivet and then you just push it it'll pop back in like so so that's the difference between a lock door and an octal technically I'd honestly have to say that this is a better design than the than the octal tubes they used to have to have retainers on these things for mobile applications so they had a spring type retainer you push down on the spring retainer and then you pull the tube out you see that a lot of that in guitar amplifiers because their tubes are inverted just like this thing they're hanging upside down and some of the guitar amplifiers some of the really big ones you know big speakers inside and people are playing really loud if they didn't have those retainer rings the tubes that vibrate and fall right out whereas a tube like this would lock itself in place you don't need the retainer it's all kind of self-contained so I don't know why these tubes weren't more widely used I do believe that this is a better design mind you you know that if you take a look at this again if you take a look at the pins they're much smaller right not a big deal but as long as the pins you know have got up you know a good contact this is technically a better design so Xenith used a lot of these tubes so there you go so that's the difference between those so getting onto the bottom side here a lot of work has to be done in order to bring this thing back like all of these wax caps have got a goal and I'll test some of these things and I'll show you the difference between some of the ones that look okay you know they look like this from the factory aside from this you know that's blown onto the sign so I'll show you the difference between some of these and some of the newer capacitors and I'll show you the difference in leakage and I'll explain a little bit about leakage and a little bit about ESR and capacitance and things like that capacitors have a lot of different tests so the tests you know you basically choose your tests wisely in a situation like this we're not really so worried about ESR with stuff like this we're worried about leakage and capacitance are the two biggest things that we're looking for now these resistors here are known as Roundy's I could do is zoom in just a little bit these are known as Roundy's now these things here move in value a lot over time just depending on their environment this particular radio looks like it's been almost kept covered up over the years so I really don't know how much these are going to move if you test a bunch of the Roundy's and they're all really close to spec there really is no point in changing them if you test one or two of them and they're way out you best go in there and just replace them all the reason that the Roundy's they move so much is that moisture ingression causes issues with these particular types of resistors the newer allen bradley style ones have got a coating on the shell that don't it doesn't really allow that moisture aggression to get in there so they stay stable and if you have allen bradley style resistors in your set a lot of the times you can just leave them alone so what I'm gonna do here is I don't think I've got one kicking around on the side I'll just go grab an allen bradley one it should be the difference all right so this is the newer stuff now you can see this one here has a shiny body on it this is me getting dust and dirt on it they have a shiny body on them and these things here usually stay very close to value this is a five percent resistor forty seven ohms at five percent and you can see these ones here they've got kind of a gritty body on them and they're all like that again if they've been kept in a garage or a barn or something like that a lot of times these resistance values move so you got to go through and you have to test all of them if just one of these resistors is out a lot your the radial performance will suffer like crazy so some of these resistors are very very important you know some of these things are you know running the plates supply to some of the tubes if a resistor like this is out of Tolerance a lot you know there's gonna be some issues so you want to make sure that this year looks like it's a 33 ohm resistor if the colors this has been kind of hot so what I'm going to do is I'm going to download a schematic here and we'll take a look at the schematic and see what's going on looks like this might have now I'm Bradley now it looks like kind of an Allen Bradley style right there actually covered up by that ever not by this piece of coax here they really didn't put the quality in here a lot of these radios what they did way back when is they just ran a wire over and they rely on the bottom portion of the you know the pan to shield it they've actually used a shielded piece of wire from them in the front to the back Rogers was always really good for that the nice thing about Rogers radios is if you ever bought something that said Rogers on it you knew that you got something that was fairly good quality it's seamless stromberg-carlson stromberg-carlson was also a very very good quality radio way back when they made some pretty fancy pieces of equipment so I even have some Hamlin radios some Hamlin Communications receivers that are stromberg-carlson Hamlin radios so we're gonna also restore some of those in the future as well lots and lots of stuff to do so what I'm going to do now is start pulling out some of these capacitors I'll show you how I take some of these capacitors out I'll get all of those changed and we'll test some of the resistors together and get this thing ready to try out and align this is my technique for removing components from a tube socket in a point-to-point scenario I'll choose this one joint here just a random choice there's a capacitor and a resistor solder to this one area here the very first thing I want to do is remove the tube from the socket I don't want to apply any heat to this pin while the tube is in and this is very important with lock tool type tubes so I'll pull this towards a dimple you'll actually see this release here on the bottom there it is reason being is because the actual pin on the tube goes directly into the glass on a lock ttle tube and you really risk damaging the seal if you heat pinup really hot and it's kind of stand-alone so you never want to do that always remove the tube now with octal tubes it's not that incredibly important reason being is because there's lead out wires from the actual tube itself that run down into the pin and then they solder the pin right at the end you can see the solder at the end of the pins here so if you were to heat the socket up a lot you risk melting the solder and you know maybe making the tubes stick in its socket but I've never had that issue a lot of times I've worked on radios like this with the octal tubes still in their socket this particular type of tube with never an issue and it doesn't hurt to remove the tube so very important for these tubes that never ever solder with these things still in place you really risk damaging the seal there so in order to remove the components from this what I want to do is I want to add some solder to remove the solder so by adding some solder here using my D soldering tool which is this hako fr 300 right here it makes better thermal connection and it also mixes with the old stuff and allows it to vacuum up easier so this is a vacuum tool so when I do this it draws the solder in the end there and pulls it into this little chamber and for those of you that own one of these tools you're probably envious of this little red light on the end here that is a definite needed thing I do not know why hako did not put this in there so it's very common to leave these tools on because they're on indicator is right here so that'll flash on and off see as it's heating and cooling so when this thing is sitting in the stand you don't see this and it's very common to leave this tool on so I added this so that I don't do that anymore that's nice a little bright red LED there I make sure that mod here in the future it's not a big deal to get one of these things apart all right so what I'm gonna do is add some solder to remove some solder so I'll add some here as you can see it's just sitting on top right now so there you go now it's starting to take and just vacuum that off and you can see how quickly that took almost all the soldier right off of that joint see that right there and cleaned that right off so now what I usually do after this is I'll go around and I'll look for how they've wrapped the component on there and I'll clip a piece of the wire away leaving enough to reattach the component that I want to leave on there so this resistor starts here and it wraps around this way so what I'm going to do is clip this off right over here and this is always handy to have a really good sharp pair of clippers do that I can just move this over like so and this capacitor here is going to let go pretty soon I'll do is I'll just put this on the other side and peel this over this way like so and there it is and you can see how nice and clean that tube connection is right there right look at that looks like brand-new looks like it's just been tinned and that just comes with being careful now a lot of people like to do the J lead kind of thing so what they'll do is they'll cut the old component off and they'll hook it over like this and then they hook the new component on to it and then they put a solder ball there I've never liked that I think that looks really messy so to spend the extra time trim away at the act at the actual wire so vacuum the solder off and again just clip away at the open portion and you get a really nice clean result like this you can put the new components in here you can even use the little hole put the components on and you know it just looks like a really professional job right so nothing worse than you know finishing off a radio and it looks really bocce right so that's one example there you can try one more let's see where's another one that'd be relatively easy to get into focus here there's another one over here so I'll try that one over there I'll move this around like so and and just a little bit of solder to this on it as well this is very important add a bit of solder and then that way it's easier to like so and this one here looks yeah like it's wrapped around like so it's a lot of the times what I'll do is I'll even take this tool like so and just unwrap it once it's D soldered like that look at how nice and clean that is and that leaves a really clean result on the tube socket itself and that way when you're working on something like this when you're done you're proud of your work everything is nice and clean all the new capacitors will be soldered in nice and clean just like that and I'll also take the time to locate the foil side as I've mentioned in many of my other videos and for those of you that are new here I'll explain what that is here in just a little bit so what I'm going to do is I'm going to get all of these capacitors out of here and I'm going to start replacing these capacitors and we'll start going through and testing some of these resistors all that as well I move this over like so there is this split capacitor so what we'll do is I'll remove this split capacitor we'll open it up we'll see how this thing is made it looks like this is five thousand Pico farad right there see five thousand PF so five thousand Pico farad is point zero zero five micro farad so the closest value to that would be point zero zero four seven so that would be the replacement and it looks like it's just running up to the controller either a tone controller or volume control at this point so it shouldn't take two incredibly long to get this thing all done and I'll show you my technique of installing new things as well as I'm going along here so I'll get some more of these caps out and I'll be back I've removed the tube from the socket over here and I've D soldered this end of the capacitor from the tube socket so what I'm going to do is remove this capacitor here carefully I left a lot of lead on here so we can do some testing let's take a closer look at the failure point of this capacitor and try to understand what the capacitor meter is doing when it's reading this capacitor and that will really help you understand what's going on inside the cap without even opening it up so first of all let's take a look at the ratings here so the capacitor is rated at point zero one micro farad so there's nothing written here that means point zero one micro farad just common knowledge from way back one d cwv means direct current working volts and this is 600 so this capacitor is rated at 600 DC working volts if you're to replace this capacitor it's always okay to go higher in voltage so you go with a 637 800 900 thousand volt capacitor you never want to go lower than this so you will not go to 550 or 5 or 400 something like that you can always go higher but not lower the capacitance value you want to keep as close to the original value as possible or you're gonna change the operating characteristics of the radio so it's gonna either sound different or something will end up happening they've chosen these values for a reason you'll change the tonal quality all sorts of different types of things so you want to stay as close to this value as possible and if you're ever working on an oscillator this is extremely important to keep very very close usually the oscillator ones are in the pico farads and if you change those capacitors out like the Domino style capacitors or any type of a mica style capacitor that's in an oscillator the radio will go way off frequency and in some cases you won't even get the dial alignment correct anymore so I'll cover more of that when we come across that in some future radios here so we want to test this capacitor and see how close to point zero 1 microfarad this reads and then you can tell me whether you think this capacitor is still good or not with this one test so what I'll do is I'll get my capacitor meter in here it's a very nice capacitor meter fortunately they discontinued this model a while back I think they have the 260 now but the 240 tests up to 200 Henry's and that's the reason I went after this one again I don't think this is in production anymore the other ones very close if you're not worried about testing something extremely extremely large inductors ok so this is on 2 micro farad scale and again this is rated at point 0 1 micro farad so let's test this out let's put this off to the side well it's reading point zero one three right on the verge of point zero one four micro farad so do you think that this would be okay to use in circuits till the capacitance very close right well why is this higher than this value here is do you think that capacitor maybe is just an overachiever maybe they you put a couple more turns in it or something like that well how capacitor testers work most capacitor testers like this is what they do is they measure the amount of time it takes to charge this capacitor up and then this does a math procedure inside to give us this value that we see on the display here so if this is going to read high that means that this is taking longer to charge if this is taking longer to charge it's going to look like a higher value is what we're seeing here so why is this taking longer to charge so in order to figure that out what I'm going to do is disconnect this here and I'm going to grab another tester so this tester here whose turn is light offs is a little less glare so this tester here looks for a thing called leakage resistance this is a DC test this is not like an ESR test an ESR test is an AC test so this is just looking for leakage resistance inside this capacitor okay so what I'm going to do is turn this device on and we're gonna see if it's going to leak internally now when I say leak I'm talking electrically I'll explain that here in just a moment I'll just attach this like this any old way is just fine and I'll put this on to test now if these LEDs come down to here on this le in this little lamp here the LED in here switches to green that would mean that this is okay and the amount of time it takes to do that is very important as well you know if you'd waited day and a half and it slowly starts to climb down that doesn't count so I'll show you how this compares to a brand-new capacitor in just a moment so as you can see there's no movement things just aren't red nothing's happening right again this thing here is a low voltage leakage tester so this thing is using low voltage to test this thing for excessive leakage resistance inside okay so as we can see there really is no change so I'll just disconnect this like so leave the leads open so what I'll do is I'll take a brand new capacitor here so this is the same value point zero one micro farad this is rated at six hundred and thirty volts all right so this is the modern replacement for that okay what I'm going to do is put this in here just like so and watch what happens look at that how fast that changed there's almost no leakage resistance in here very very very little leakage resistance so if I do this I'll shut it off again okay and discharge it and I'll try one more time here we go look at how fast that works comes right down again the old capacitor shut this off do the same test again put this in here like so and like so okay and here we go and as you can see there's virtually no movement there at all so now that we know this we know that this thing has excessive leakage so this thing is looking like a resistor so if you were to take a high value resistor and bridge it across this capacitor that's what this is starting to look like inside it's now our resistor capacitor I guess you could say so there is parallel resistance being formed by the decay inside this capacitor and that will form a thing called leakage resistance as this decays that leakage resistance will end up getting closer and closer and closer to being a dead short okay so I'll just disconnect that shut the device off so now again I'll get the other capacitor tester out here so here we go so now again if we look at this here hook this up to the cap tester there we go point zero one three micro farad now as I explained earlier if this takes longer to charge this is looking like it has more capacitance right because it's you know it's displaying more capacitance here if it takes longer to charge the reason it's taking longer to charge is because there's a resistor formed across this inside you can look at that as a you know almost like a make-belief resistor being formed across here inside if there's a resistor across this capacitor it's going to take longer to charge this capacitor right because there's bleek egde across it and that's what this is showing that's why the capacitor meter reads high so for all of you that think when you're working on an old radio if you just use a capacitor meter like this or any other type of DMM style capacitor meter and you test the cap like this you look on your meter and it reads a little bit high you're thinking to yourself oh it's just an overachiever it's a really good component well no the reason it's reading high is because it's failing so here we go brand new capacitor point zero one micro farad 630 volts the same one that we just tested let's see what it reads on here spot-on point zero one that's how it should read so there is an explanation of what's going on in those capacitors now there's a lot of other tests for capacitors and I will cover more of this in the future I've talked a lot about this stuff on patreon those capacitor testers I have another capacitor tester as well which will also indicate the outside foil and there's another really interesting thing about this circuit and I'll explain that in just a moment so that capacitor tester that I just showed you right here this one I'll just remove the leads hanging around this little tester that you see right here is on patreon all the plans to build this and the schematics the instructions the alignment procedure all the measurements to drill the box even everything is available up there lots of people have made these things and they're extremely happy with the result just lately there's a few people that have put some stenciling on these boxes I haven't had time to do that with this yet but there's a lot of people that have put stenciling on these boxes and they look just incredibly good they've done some really nice work putting these things together so this is up there so if you're interested if you're a guitar amplifier repair guy or you know if you're working on switch mode power supplies that have lots of Paulie style capacitors snubbing networks things like that you work on all televisions radios communications receivers this thing is indispensable I use this thing all the time and it even has a forecast setting which will the minor amount of leakage resistance that this capacitor had is a major amount of leakage resistance in this position this will look for the just the absolute aeneas amount of resistance being you know a leakage problem in mica capacitors and things like that ceramics and all sorts of things extremely sensitive low voltage capacitor leakage tester this thing works incredibly well and again I've shared this with the entire community on patreon so if you're interested in putting something like that together and you are one of these guys that repairs things all the time or if you're just a test equipment buff that likes to have very accurate readings know what's going on and so things this is definitely a beneficial thing to have on your bench for those of you that were really paying attention in the last shot you may have noticed that before I had this capacitor fully attached to the tester you saw the little LEDs flicker on the meter here why did that happened and that also brings up a very important safety topic when using test leads well first of all this device is so incredibly sensitive that it will see my body's resistance through these boots I'm not even contacting anything metal so to give you an example I'll just pinch both of these boots and look what happens I'm not touching any metal I'm just pinching the boots and that's the reason it saw that now if I make contact to the supply it's even more sensitive because now I've got the supply on me from this device here and I can just gently hold this and it'll go right to the top and that's extremely sensitive in the forecast setting you know I could I barely have to hold these things at all as you can see it just goes right to the top so that's the reason you saw the meter move so what does that tell us well if it's seeing my body resistance through these things are these things really acting as insulators not really their resistive very important thing to remember if you're ever working on any type of high-voltage gear and you have test leads never ever rely on the boot to protect you if there's a supply on in the device never pinch this what you're doing is you're grabbing the boot and as you squeeze this tighter and tighter the resistance is going down if there's even the slightest hole in one of these boots and this is attached to something in circuit and you go to unclip this while it's live you could receive an extremely bad shock so always remember that not all test leads and alligator clips are created the same these boots here are conductive let's see if this one here is I'll just clip this onto this lead right here put that over here it's on forecast so what I'll do is I'll just grab the boot of this and the boot of this see that look at that it's conductive look at that right down here even the wire itself even looks like it's mildly conductive I just hold this over here look at how conductive that is I'm not even close to the top so there you go you can also use this device to see how incredibly conductive your your test leads are so again imagine if there was you know a couple hundred volts on this or something like that and you forgot to discharge your device or turn it off and you want to grab this and you pinched it something to be very very aware of so just be careful make sure all of your devices are discharged and everything is unplugged in you know they're all the voltage is gone out of your equipment before you go about grabbing one of these things and pinching them to remove them as I'm going through this radio receiver replacing all of these older capacitors I want to make sure that I'm installing the new capacitors the exact same way I'm removing these old capacitors what do I mean by that well you'll notice on this capacitor here that there's a black band that says outside foil what does that mean that means that this lead right here is attached to the outermost foil layer on this capacitor that outermost foil layer can be used as a shield for what's inside so you can picture the outermost foil layer like the braid on a piece of coax covering the entire capacitor and being attached to this lead right here now you can see where this would be important in a vacuum tube circuit vacuum tube circuits are very high impedance circuits and these things are usually elevated above the chassis there's lines running below them so if this was attached to say the screen grid of a tube and this was acting as a bypass capacitor this end would be attached to the chassis so this entire capacitor would be shielded right up to this point right here and only the lead that's exposed to the actual tube socket itself would act as somewhat of a interference pickup or a hum pickup if you were to reverse this capacitor and tie this end to the chassis this whole area of the capacitor is now attached to the grid of that tube so if you had a filament line running underneath this thing that had you know quite a bit of current on it or something like that what will happen is that filament line could interfere with this capacitor so this capacitor could pick this thing up like a hum antenna and I'm going to explain what a hum antenna here is in just a moment so it's very important to make sure when you put your capacitors into circuit that they are orientated the correct way there's a reason they put this band on the capacitor and put outside foil on all these older capacitors these capacitors are in high impedance circuits whereas all of the modern circuitry the majority of modern circuitry is a lot lower impedance than this stuff and that's why on a brand new capacitor like this you don't see any markings so they don't tell you the outside foil usually with a capacitor like this it's sitting flush on a ground plane on a circuit board and the leads are bent down so it's shielded right there alone just by having this thing on a ground plane and then of course you have a box around it most of the circuitry that surrounds these capacitors nowadays is DC whereas in an old radio receiver like this there are a lot of AC lines running around you of the filament lines running around which I've current on them and they're carrying AC there are so many reasons to put these capacitors in circuit the correct way and it really does affect the performance of many receivers now a lot of techs think that that's not all that incredibly important I can just put this thing in anyway well you know the outcome is only as good as the work that you put into it right and I've had receivers that have come here that are breaking into oscillation when people have recapped them and it's due to a capacitor let's put the wrong way you just change the capacitor around and the oscillation stops so in very sensitive circuitry this is all important and I can't stress this enough so if you're working on guitar amplifiers or radio receivers televisions anything like that spend the extra time and just locate the outside foil and do yourself a favor tuck the capacitor if it needs to be close to the chassis as well you know the lead length from this end to the tube sock it should be as short as possible if you need to add a heat relief put a small coil in to the to the actual tube socket itself there are many things that you can do take the extra time to locate that outside foil do the best job you can now in order to locate the outside foil on this there's a lot of ways of doing this you can take you know the leads from an amplifier and hook it both ways and listen for the hum I've created a box that just makes this a whole lot easier I've created a bunch of devices one of them I show here right on YouTube and this is the latest one that's up on patreon here and this one here just automatically locates it so very simply all we're doing is we're looking for the lowest amount of LEDs with the corresponding LED lit down here and that tells us the outside foil layer so let me give you an example okay so I'll just put this in here like so and I'll put this in here like so okay so it's just clipped in the leads just like this and I'm just gonna hold this with my hands I'm acting as the hum antenna something like an open AC line under an incorrectly placed capacitor would act like okay so I'm just gonna hold on to this I'm going to turn the device on and we'll look for the LED with the lowest LEDs so you can see this LED is lit with the lowest LEDs up here when I touch the box I ground myself out see that the lowest amount of LEDs with the corresponding LED down here indicates the outside foil so this side here is the outside foil just that simple so what do I do I remove this like so get my pen put a little black dot right here so it doesn't deface the capacitor just like so and now that's the outside foil end so this capacitor let's get this out of the way so this capacitor would be in circuit like this I would know to take this end and put it this way just like this outside foil on this end outside foil on this end and now this capacitor is put into circuit the right way now you might be thinking to yourself well is all the writing like this on all the capacitors no they're not these things are going down the production line every single way this way this way this way they're going all down the line and different you know I can sort lots of these things and get about a 50/50 mix it seems almost so 50% of the dots will be on this side and 50% of the dots will be on this side I've sorted lots and lots of these capacitors these are excellent capacitors by the way so it's very important to locate that so yeah you got to take the time to grade all the capacitors that go in but if you create a device like this it just goes that fast so again this is available with all the plans and everything up on patreon if you're interested in building one of these things very handy unit to have makes life a lot simpler there is a lot of mileage on that box I can tell you that that thing has switched back and forth many many times so I'm going to start installing all these capacitors into the chassis and when I have all of those caps in there well look at the resistors and through the magic of the camera three days later this is the point I'm at on the underside of this chassis some of you might be asking yourself what doesn't look a whole lot of work has been done here when in fact a lot of work has been done and I'll explain my entire thought process is I've changed these components and changed some of the components completely to a different style and as I've done all sorts of things you'll notice that I've left all the resistors behind and that's because we are going to test those resistors together so what we're going to do is we'll test them all we'll see if we should replace every resistor in here should we only replace the ones that need to be replaced or can we just leave them all Hynde and I'll explain my thought process in that as well again these resistors are very susceptible to the environment that they've been kept in over the years again when we test the resistors we'll get back into that so one of the very first things I always like to look at in a chassis like this when I'm working on it is I like to think about the safety factor how can I improve the safety of this radio receiver one of the very first things to do is get rid of that line cord that isn't polarized and put a polarized line cord on so grab the line cord that's behind me here this is the one that came with it you'll notice that you can plug it in this way or you can plug it in this way either way there's no polarization here there's no indexed pin whereas on the replacement line cord there is an index pin you can see this so we can only plug this in one way that allows us to keep the neutral side of the AC line as close to the chassis as possible whereas with the other line cord we have a 50/50 chance of putting the chassis closer to the hot side and we definitely don't want that now it's not as simple as just changing a line cord a lot of the times they put the switch in what could be the neutral side so that has to be all changed what I mean here is this is the factory schematic right here so you see this is the line cord here this is the plug and you'll see a switch and that switch runs over to what would be the ground of the radio or the chassis here you can see how they've tied the chassis through a capacitor they've AC coupled the chassis to the ground here so if you were to plug this thing in you have a chance of putting the switch in the hot side all right but then the chassis of the radio is close to the hot side because of this capacitor the other catch-22 is if you flip it around now this side is hot but this side is neutral so now you've put the switch in the neutral line so if you open that switch the hot side is still connected all over here so there's a really big chance that the chassis itself through all the other components is going to be led to the hot side it'll be AC coupled so any way you look at it if you leave this switch on this side it's still kind of a dangerous thing so you have to remove this which from this side make that a solid line and put the switch on this side here so you can only break the hot connection and the neutral side then is now firmly attached to the chassis and then of course we have our coupling here AC coupling through this capacitor this chassis now c24 is often known as the death capacitor kind of strong words for a capacitor but what happens is is these capacitors they end up shorting out and what they do is if you have this plugged in the wrong way say this is the hot side and the switch is closed it attaches the chassis directly to the wall outlet kind of a scary situation so that's why we replace all those capacitors with x1 y2 rated safety capacitors all over the place ER now you're probably saying to yourself what how come there's look at there's only one here right this is only one how come there's so many of these capacitors well this is something that a lot of techs overlook they have to be put in more places than just there because there's external connections all over the place here so for example okay we have a capacitor here that's across the line all right so we need one of those capacitors there that's this capacitor here this capacitor here is a higher rating so this capacitor that runs from the chassis to ground also needs to be one of those style capacitors now because this has got a higher rating I use two of them here so there's 2 X 1 Y 2 rated capacitor from the line to the chassis right here so it just gives me a little bit more capacitance that's all now what about these ones why are these ones over here well if we go all the way over to the antenna connection here this is one of the wires that leads out of the back of the radio for you to attach an external antenna so we can see it goes through a coil here and then look what's here a capacitor directly to the ground again so in order to isolate this connection we need to make this a safety cap as well and if we go to the external ground lead there's a cap in line with it as well remember this is 2 AC couple we're dealing with RF here right you know this is not a DC situation so this is the reason that capacitors are acting is isolation here so you can see that we have a capacitor on the hot side or the antenna side it's on actually on the ground side of the coil you can see that here or on the neutral side of the coil and then it says here external ground we can see the actual external ground connection is here so this allows us to isolate the radio and also if there was to ever be a problem like say there was a connection you know that would you know create any type of current on this side say the wiring and your house was reversed or something like that right so say the which is kind of common but say the wiring was reversed if the hot side was on the chassis here this is just extra protection because this is gonna really lower the amount of current that can be passed here you know it's gonna pass current but it'll be very low through these two values so these need to be safety caps as well and of course capacitors isolate DC completely so if you ever come across this with a some form of a DC source nothing would happen to the coil and the capacitors are low enough in value that you know if something was to happen it wouldn't fry this coil if there was no capacitor here on C there was no c2 here and this end went directly to the chassis if for some reason this was plugged into the hot side okay so if this was switching the hot side in the hot side was here the hot side of your AC line would go right through this antenna coil right to that connection to the antenna connection on the back side of the radio so you know any type of connection to that would blow this coil sky-high to be a huge flash inside the radio and it would be done so very important to have safety capacitors right there as well and that's the reason that they're all over the place here so you can see them here now the line cord itself had a knot tied in it just like this a lot of people ask me where do you get your replacement line cords this line cord is just a six-foot extension cord a very good quality six-foot extension cord another thing to be very leery about when you're buying a cord to use for something like this it needs to be a high quality cord there's a lot of garbage on the market nowadays another thing when you're tying the knot make sure that the wires don't overlap they like to twist and overlap you want to make sure that the wires go through the knot perfectly now the knot itself you'll notice this is a strain relief so I can't pull the cord out of the radio and there's also slack in the wires so that nothing gets tight on the terminal ties strips you'll notice that this knot here is right up against the chassis and if I turn the knot if I try to turn the knot you can see that it's not gonna really hit anything except this the actual chassis itself now you'll notice that if I find it over here lots of rubble around this radio because I'm replacing so many components you'll notice that there's a terminal tie strip that's right here this is a terminal tie strip right here alright so this is where you used to tie off external components to if you're doing point-to-point wiring you tie it to here and you can run things around that's why these these things are here these sometimes they're called you know tie boards or whatever but most commonly known as a terminal type oinked terminal tie strip now we don't want that not to come touching this at all right so it's very important now this was there's a bit of a thought process in that as well first of all you got to make sure the knot is tightened that the wires aren't overlapping or your knot will become very big and then it'll rub things you don't want anything to rub the line cord because the line cord needs to be protected from all that you'll notice that there is a slight chance of this wire sensors a big droop here you can't really see it on camera because we're looking straight down but there's quite a bit of a droop here as it goes to this terminal tie strip you'll notice that there's a droop here and there's a chance that it could come close to this terminal here so there's a piece of high heat shielded tubing here this is much like the stuff that you find in your toaster oven and it protects the cord here so if anything was to ever happen it would rub against this this is silicone coated as well very very high heat stuff very important to have you'll notice that there's also a loop here acting as a strain relief on the other portion and you'll notice that there's a zap strap or a tie strap down here so that's holding this wire steady and keeping it away from components as you can see so the strain relief is working now I could tie knot on the outside as well not really too needed in a case like this and in many radios there is no not on the outside if you're concerned about pushing the cord back into the radio which is really kind of hard you could put a zap strap or something on here as well now this here is kind of a different scenario because this is hiding up inside of a wood cabinet and there's you know maybe a couple of feet down to the bottom a foot and a half two feet down to the bottom of the cabinet where it runs out of a little cutout on the backside of the radio so there's really no twisting up here and there's so much line cord that you know you could move it around down here and nothing happens up here at all right so this is running over here through the Zap strap which is holding this out of the way and then that runs over here to where that line cord joins together again you can see that the line cord is joined here there's a little bit of a trick in doing that and the line cord itself is pressed flat against the chassis as it runs all the way along here this is very important to keep the flat side of the line cord running against the chassis because you want this kept away from any signal carrying leads you want this as far away from the audio this is way up on the chassis this here again we're looking down so it's kind of hard to see this is way down at the bottom of the chassis and it's away from any signal carrying leads or anything that would be sensitive to picking up hum in a lot of cases it's a good idea to also twist the line cord tightly and run it up here since this is still a piece of line cord that's one solid piece and it's close to the edge of the chassis here it's absolutely fine to leave it like that so when I'm putting the line cord II and what I do is I pull about you know a foot and a half of it through and then tie the knot so I've got about a foot and a half here and I got a lot of stuff to work with so the foot and a half that's beyond the knot here what I'll do is I'll say this is in the radio here right so say this is coming through the radio like this I'll figure out how much I need to go from here to here and then I'll click the appropriate lead and then just move them out and then I'll leave this together and then what happens is it joins back up here again and I get a nice solid piece so it makes for a very clean install with the line cord so this is all still together here and of course that eliminates another connection as well now the original line cord had a knot in here and this looped right underneath this oscillator coil and came all the way back that's a huge no-no in design and that was factory something that the person who'd assembled this radio should have known so the oscillator portion of the radio is very sensitive to any kind of moon mint it's also sensitive to any type of thermal movement so as we all know to brady o's go from being dead cold like this to as hot as the blazes of hell when they're working right so we need to make sure that the components and everything that's around the oscillator section is very solid and won't thermally move now having a line cord that can just move around with it drooped under the line cord by me moving the line cord or just moving it will cause frequency drift on the dial because it's going to move closer and further away from this coil this coil is very sensitive to anything that's placed close to it if I'm listening to a frequency and I move my hand close to this coil the thing will go right off frequency that's how sensitive this is a big air core coil over here now what they've also done factory to save money is they used wax capacitors to couple from the oscillator coil into the circuitry over here now they took great care with the tuning circuitry over here you know this is a ceramic style capacitor with a temperature compensated capacitor across it but what they used to couple it into the circuitry over here was wax which doesn't make any sense so instead of you know replacing that with just a standard Paulie style capacitor which many people would probably do you want to use the most thermally stable components in a section like this as possible so you want to use like a mica capacitor or an NP 0 style capacitor so these are Micah's at the same value of the waxes that I put out and I've replaced all three of the waxes that are in the oscillator section here with Micah's so that'll greatly improve the stability performance of this radio receiver I betcha way back when when you tune this to your favorite channel or to your favorite frequency on the am dial if you listen to it for 15 minutes it would zip off frequency in 15 minutes and you'd have to correct it this should compensate for that and that would no longer happen again these capacitors are expensive back in the day and they still are kind of expensive mica capacitors so there's no bean counters here right and I'm rebuilding this thing I want this to be as solid as possible and as safe as possible so why not use the best parts as possible just make the thing better right now you'll notice that I've left all the resistors in as I said earlier and we're going to test all of these things together I've also left this capacitor and I didn't change this one this is a ceramic tubular style capacitor and they very rarely fail and this is a critical component if you change this out with just a standard you know ceramic non-nba au style capacitor that will incur frequency drift with temperature change the reason that they use these ceramic capacitors is they're very stable with temperature change and that's the reason it's across this adjustment here this is a very sensitive adjustment this is what's gonna allow us to align the band later so this can be left in circuit leaves very rarely fail and in fact a lot of mica capacitors can be left in circuit without having to change them if they are still okay now again again if the radio has been exposed to a bad environment say it's been in a garage for 30 years or say it's been in an attic or something that hasn't been temperature controlled you probably want to check the Micah's just to be sure now again a lot of the capacitor leakage testers the high voltage ones won't see the leakage in a mica capacitor especially if it's starting to get just slightly leaky whereas that capacitor tester that I've shown you earlier will see the leakage in all of these even if it's the most minut amount and that'll give you an idea of what environment it's been you know captain so something to keep in mind so not all capacitor testers are created equally so the device that I've created I'm at I'm a test equipment of fection Otto and if I find something that needs to be tested in a different way and there isn't a device out there to do it I'll just make it and that's what I've done and again I've shared that on patron with everybody it's a lot of test equipment that I've designed and shared up there so now all the other wax capacitors have replaced with these and these orange tip style capacitors these black dots here indicate the outside foil and since this is ground this is the outside foil end of this capacitor they're very close together they will not couple because this capacitor is shielded from this one here by its outside foil so I can therefore put these very close together and keep them away from the line cord another perk of locating the outside foil these capacitors all have the outside foil and located and these have all been installed in the circuit the way they should be you'll notice that the the ground end of things is longer and the capacitor itself is placed closer to the tube socket to reduce lead length on this side so this is capacitor shielded right up to this point right here and this is the only little bit of lead that's exposed and it's the same way with all the capacitors that need to be done like that so they're all placed into circuit this way you know the ones that are very important you'll see the long lead length here is very lonely this actually runs down to the tube socket it's up off the tube you can see that there see how long those are and there's very short amount of lead then again this is running too common okay so where did my capacitor I see that I'm using this capacitor to hold the radio up and it's stuck to the dial now which is a good thing so there we go what else can I tell you the filter capacitors have been replaced this filter capacitor here is the original now this isn't original to the radio this was a replacement that somebody had added in here the capacitance values are too low it's supposed to be 80 and 40 this 50 and 30 and we can also see a price of two dollars in twenty five cents way back in the day so this thing is out of there and it's been replaced with two very I guess you could say high-quality Rubicon capacitors then these are also rated at 105 degrees C capacitor technology's come a long way since way back when one thing to keep in mind another hint for any of you that are just getting into this these capacitors here are counterfeit all over the place you got to be very careful if you want genuine components you got to go to a reputable source it's very easy to purchase counterfeit capacitors now so these are genuine Rubicon components there's a lot of things that you can tell the counterfeiters are getting kind of tricky they're even starting to use the same vent stamp but the vent stamp is one way to tell if it's a counterfeit capacitor look at the writing you know compared to a new device if you have genuine devices you can compare them the bottom you can you can compare the the heat shrink the actual tubing that the users a lot of things to compare but they are getting pretty tricky nowadays so you want to make sure that you're getting genuine parts now these parts here are held by these standoffs I had to add the standoffs because this was clamped to the front right with this clamp right here so I added those standoffs you can see and those hold the capacitors in place now and they're also the electrical connection now the big thing with this is if this was in a guitar amplifier so say you're working on a guitar amplifier it has two 12-inch speakers is a bunch of 6l sixes or el34s or something underneath it and you're to replace these capacitors you can see that they're just loose here you'd want to put some silicon underneath these capacitors to hold them so that they're not going to vibrate because if they're in a high vibration atmosphere you don't want this thing buzzing against the chassis and of course that's going to create external noise you don't want that it's not good for the component this is not in a high vibration atmosphere so it's completely fine to leave these like this if you're gonna fasten capacitors or anything down into chassis like this don't use normal silicon and don't use hot glue because these things get very hot the hot glue will just let go what you want to do is use a product called GE silicone - now I'm not endorsed by these people at all or anything it's just a really good product and it won't corrode the area it's a very non acidic type of of silicone it doesn't have that vinegary smell it has a very mild smell to it and it won't corrode the area that's the kind of stuff that you want to use alright I usually buy the big caulking tube and put it in a caulking gun and use it to to fasten things if I need to do that if they're in a high vibration atmosphere things that you need to definitely think about not only that if this isn't a high vibration atmosphere and this thing is moving like this a lot what it's it gonna do to the solder joints over time rate that's gonna try and open them up so you got to be very careful with that so whenever anything is in a high vibration atmosphere you always want to make sure that it's attached to a chassis very firmly with something to hold it so that it'll dampen the the vibration what else can I tell you about this here so much has been done in this chassis I haven't cleaned to be re-examined use some contact cleaner to clean the vrs and this as well the oscillator coil here because of the line cord was was moving in there and stuff at this here came loose so I fastened it back into the bottom here new wires run from the standoffs to the same location that the factory capacitor was installed there are some other capacitors here as well these ones here I removed we're gonna test these and see what's inside these things they look very much like a mica capacitor and what we're gonna do is test these with that cap tester and without even opening this thing up let's determine what's going on inside this thing I replace those anyways it should replace all of the vault capacitors in here just to make things more dependable so I still need to clean the upper side of the chassis and get this thing ready for alignment all that kind of stuff so the next thing that we're gonna do now is we're going to go through and test all the resistors and we'll make a decision as to whether those resistors need to be changed or that we can leave them behind again I've put all the tubes back in circuit to give you a demonstration that the resistors can be tested in circuit in vacuum tube circuits because tubes are high impedance devices unlike transistors and everything else that'll be you know mounted to a circuit board a lot of the times on circuit boards the components around the resistors will skew your readings because you're dealing with a lot of lower impedance devices so vacuum tube equipment makes testing these components a lot easier because the tubes look like an open circuit most of the time right so I'll get the meter all set up and I'll be right back all right let's test some resistors together so what do you think do you think they're gonna be relatively close to their value do you think they're gonna all be way off well let's find out so I've left all the vacuum tubes in circuit as mentioned before and we'll test all of these resistors just the way they are the only one resistor that I've removed one end on is this one right here and that's because it's across two variable resistors and there's bound to be some hiding parallel resistance in there that's going to give us a funny reading so just to be on the safe side I just D soldered one end so if you ever know that there's some hiding parallel resistance somewhere it's always a good idea to open one end of the device or get rid of the parallel resistance so that you can get a nice solid reading on the device in question another thing you'll notice is all these resistors have a silver band on them that silver band means that when the resistors came from the factory they were within 10% of their reading so whatever they say on the top of the resistor in in their color code it's within 10% of that this radio was produced in 1947 and if it's moved just a little bit beyond that 10% chances are it's going to be pretty stable by now and it's not gonna move any further so if it's moved slightly beyond in either direction I'm not really too concerned about it it's not going to affect the performance of the radio receiver we're not dealing with precision voltage dividers here or anything like that if they've moved a long ways yeah of course then we're gonna end up replacing resistors in this thing and making sure that it's going to work properly as I go through my videos here in the future you'll get a better feel for which resistors can stay in circuit and which ones should actually go we're gonna be working on a lot of test equipment we're gonna be working on radios and televisions I haven't done a television yet but I've got quite a few of them here so we're gonna go through all of this kind of stuff and you'll get a better feel for which resistors can kind of hang out in the circuit and what's not gonna make much of a big deal whatsoever so as I'm going along I'll tell you which resistors are good and which ones you know need tap which ones need to go so I'll just choose a random resistor here and I'll start with it so we'll start with this one here so we always want to read towards the silver line in this little gap on the end of the body well here's one of my probes here as a pointer I'm using this meter right here because it has a nice big display and it reads relatively fast it's the only reason to have this in the shot right now so let's take a look at this one here so it's yellow purple yellow silver so yellow is 4 purple is 7 yellow is 4 and then this is the 10% Ben so 4 7 4 would be the code for this resistor if it was a modern device if it was on a circuit board even a modern surface mount type resistor this would say 4 7 4 on the top of it it's just these older resistors they read in colors so the trick to making this really quick is knowing the first two colors 4 7 and then the next one is a multiplier so you change that number directly into zeros so if this is the number for use for zeros in that spot all right if we look at this resistor and we see it's brown we know that's the number 1 so that's 1 0 we see red over here that's the number 2 so that's 2 0 so for seven and then for zeroes is four hundred and seventy thousand ohms or 470 K ohms so let's see how close this is to that value I would say that's pretty close no problems of that resistor so so far we're doing very good this one here is orange white yellow so orange is three white is nine yellow again is a multiplier so it's four zeros three hundred and ninety thousand ohms or three hundred and ninety K ohms so let's see what this one reads that one's way off 493 K ohms so it's three hundred and ninety and it's up to four hundred and ninety so it's a hundred K ohms off so this one here definitely has to go so one bad one so so far it's 50/50 let's look at this one here red red-orange two to three so two two and then three zeros 22,000 ohms so let's see what this reads so it should say 22 K or somewhere around there twenty two point six twenty two point seven K no problems that can stay in circuit so two good ones so far let's test this one here green blue yellow 5 6 and then the multiplier is four zeros again so five hundred and sixty thousand ohms or five hundred and sixty K no problems there 566 that can stay in circuit green or red red green so we've got two two and then the multiplier is green so that's five zeros that's 2.2 million ohms that one's way up there let's see what this one reads 2.4 no problems whatsoever that can stay let's read this resistor right here brown black red so brown one black zero red another two zeros so 1k ohm let's see how close this is 1.18 not a problem so you can see about slightly beyond 10% but that's not gonna make any difference if I change this out that resistor can stay no big deal whatsoever let's test this one here so this is one five one so 150 ohms let's see what this one reads oops ooh 229 that's another one that has to go that's way off so so far this one has to go and this one has to go let's test this one here that I've opened up really curious about that one so this is three nine and then the multiplier is three zeroes so 39,000 ohms or 39k ohms 35 that's pretty good this one's gone the opposite way no problems there that can stay there let's see what other one now this one here this is usually the one that always moves it's on the rectifier tube socket so and this is dealing with the the brunt of the the load on the plate so chances are this one is gonna have moved I can almost guarantee and you can even see the colors changed yeah 44:44 ohms so this is three three and then zero so this should be 33 ohms this is 44 ohms so I'll definitely change this one out and what I'm going to do is I'm gonna end up putting a metal film resistor in there so that'll be nice and stable in this spot right here so that's one that needs to be changed you'll recall and the other radio that I worked on here not long ago I replace this as well these ones are always moving value they're always getting warm right there's another resistor down here red red orange so that's another 22 K homers let's see what that one reads Wow look at that one almost spot-on 22 K ohms no problems there so is one hiding under here is brown black green so that's brown is one black is zero in green is five zeros after that so 1 million ohms so let's see if we get a reading on that 1.1 Meg not a problem that can stay see this one here this one is brown black blue so one zero and six zeros so that's 10 million ohms no problems that's ten point nine Meg not an issue in this circuit whatsoever so all in all the only resistors that really need to be changed are this one this one in this one this one I expected to go so technically there's two resistors in here that are really bad other than that all the rest of them are good so I vote to leave all the resistors in just the way they are and we'll try the receiver out and see how well it works so I'll get on replacing both of these resistors and this one under my fingers here and we'll try it out the new resistors have been installed the 390 K resistor is here the 150 ohm resistor is right here and the new 33 ohm resistor is right here I've cleaned the potentiometers with contact cleaner and the switch here as well I've also lubricated these shafts here with just a little bit of oil and I've also done that to the tuning capacitor on the upper side of the chassis and I just wiped down the chassis and clean off the tubes and the thing looks like brand-new there's basically nothing to clean on this it's in such nice condition so it looks like I can do the entire alignment procedure from the upper portion of the chassis so do you think this thing is going to work let's try it out so what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna put the bottom pan on this so I'll fasten the bottom pan turn the thing over and we'll give it a try alright the moment of truth has arrived I have the bottom her back on the radio I've cleaned the upper portion of the chassis and I've cleaned off all of the tubes I've lubricated the tuning capacitor here and everything so it's ready to try out at this point I have this thing plugged into my isolation transformer and current limited variac supply because this is the first power up and I want to bring it up very very slowly just in case there is something wrong so there's no if' alignment there is no alignment to the oscillator or to the antenna section or anything I haven't even tested any of the tubes so what do you think do you think it's going to work on its first try or do you think we're going to need to go back into this thing again well let's find out so I have the antenna attached to an external antenna and I also have my test speaker attached so I'm ready to go it's the very first thing I want to do is turn this thing on and just have it on and then I'll use my isolation transformer and variac supply to slowly bring this thing up so I'll turn that on right now and I'll turn the isolation transformer up to about 40 volts and I'll just let that sit for a moment now if any of the filaments in these vacuum tubes is open none of the tubes will light up because all of the filaments are in series like an old Christmas light string so and I see light so that's a good sign so the filaments are good in these vacuum tubes now whether there's any emission that's another thing so far there is no excessive current draw so I'm going to turn it up some more to about seventy five volts and I'll let it sit there for just a moment so far everything is looking really good there's no excessive current draw on the isolation transformer or a current limited variac supply I really wish I could have that in the shot here so you can see the dim bulbs glowing and everything like that but it's just so big and it just all of this stuff won't fit in this shot so alternate right up now and that's to its maximum so now this has got full line voltage on it and it's doing well no problems whatsoever and I think I might even hear some action in the speaker just a little bit so see that would be tone Wow [Applause] [Applause] Wow no alignment or anything nothing has been done to this at this point except just the components on the underside so you can imagine what doing an alignment is going to do this receiver it's going to wake it right up so doing an if' alignment and the oscillator alignment and antenna alignment looks like you can all be done from the upper portion of the chassis so what I need to do is I need to get this all set up with some test gear a signal generator and everything and I'll bring you through the if' alignment with me that's the very first alignment that needs to be done on a radio receiver the antenna and the oscillator alignment can be done after that we need to get the if' chain working correctly first so that's what we'll focus on now I'm ready to perform an if' alignment on this radio receiver and my test equipment is set up as follows my signal generator is set to 455 kilohertz that's the frequency of the if' section here and I need to peak up these adjustments here until I get maximum amplitude on the screen and I'll show you that here in just a moment that 455 kilohertz signal is modulated by a 1000 cycle tone or 1 kilohertz tone at 50 percent modulation the output of my signal generator is about 1.3 millivolts right now and that is being fed directly to the antenna input leads right here this is a bit of a shortcut because the if' section in here is already working it's working quite well so I can cram a bit of a signal through the antenna section and align the if' just fine now as I mentioned in many of my other videos the trick behind a successful alignment in anything is to keep the device under test from seeing the test equipment so you want to keep your test equipment invisible to the device under test by me feeding the signal into the inputs the antenna input section that's really far away from the if' chain and it has to go through all of this section and this isn't even tuned for 455 the lowest frequency on the dial is about 550 kilohertz so I'm just seeing a signal through this section just to get it into the eye off and then I'll peek this up as much as I can you'll notice I also have the tuning condenser fully meshed and by having the condenser fully meshed is it's at the bottom portion of the AM broadcast band and it's also nice and quiet there as well I have my oscilloscope attached across the speaker leads here and all I'm gonna do is turn the volume up until I get a signal you can see on the oscilloscope screen and now what I'm going to do is just peak up the adjustments so what I'll do is I'll just disconnect the speaker so we don't need to listen to that and what I'm going to do is just move these screws until I find a peak on the screen and I just want the maximum signal I can find so you can see just turning this just a little bit brought the amplitude up that much so what I'll do is I'll turn this one here whoa look at that I got to turn the volume down just turn this down vote here and now I'll adjust this again because it was right off the screen Wow look at how much gain I'm getting out of this one adjustment just by adjusting this so turn it down again now I'll move the adjustment over here and again I'm just searching for a peak okay so that was the peak and I just passed it so if I turn past the peak if I just back the tuning tool up and search for the peak I just want the highest amount of amplitude I can find now I'll go back to the first one here again just make sure that one's okay now I'll move over to this one here and I'll adjust this one and we'll see if we can get any more amplitude out of this this one here is pretty pretty tight that one see this one here these are very close so again I'm just looking for the maximum amount of amplitude and then what I'll do is I'll go and test this one one more time just to make sure that it's at the max and sometimes this takes just a little bit of fiddling to get it right to the absolute maximum I think that's about it right there and that's it for the if' alignment now the if' chain is completely peaked up at 455 kilohertz and I'm ready to adjust the oscillator that's it it's just that simple so again signal generator to the antenna input leads and the oscilloscope is just across the speaker output leads this is how it was done in the old days a lot of the times so again now I need to adjust the oscillator but in order to do that I need to put this back into the cabinet because I need to align the pointer to the actual dial itself and then I need to move that back and forth to adjust the oscillator so that the tracking is correct now when I say tracking what I mean is if I tune this to say 500 or 550 a.m. it needs to point to 550 am on the actual dial glass if this is not calibrated correctly it might point to 600 a.m. but it's actually playing 550 so then I have to adjust this until everything tracks correctly so 550 is pointing at 550 and then 1600 is pointing at 1600 now usually they have a yes they do on the alignment sheet here it says 600 kilohertz so they want the bottom end aligned at 600 and they want the top end aligned at 1600 kilocycles or one point six megahertz however you want to call that so that'll be the next step in the alignment here before I put the chassis back into the wooden cabinet I want to clean the radio's dial glass and I also want to clean that diffuser that's just below the dial glass you know the one with a little crack in it we had to move that out of the way to get the knee well I completely removed that and it just snapped into two pieces just like that extremely brittle so I thought to myself what am I going to do to put this back together so what I did is I put some glue on here and then I sanded the glue on this side and then clear coated this with a satin but the crack still really shows up on this side this is the result with just the glue before sanding in any type of a satin clear coat so looking at this this plastic here is aged and as it ages it goes orange and this is really common for this type of material this type of material was used in hella crafters radios and things like that for their dial as well so this is more along the lines of the color when it came out it's actually just a little bit lighter than that so kind of a yellowy color and again just because of age it's changed color you can really see where the light shining it's really gone dark orange here and you can see on the edges where it's been shielded from the light where it's been held in it's worked a little bit lighter on these on these sides here so I'm thinking to myself what am I gonna do to replace this thing this is a diffuser you know it has to diffuse the light and everything so I looked at different types of plastics and I thought you know maybe you know thin paper diffuser or something in there would work but nothing really worked until I thought hey what if I each a piece of circuit board and then just use it as the diffuser and there it is and it works really nice with the light shining through it as well and it gives it a nice golden type of color with the light shining through it so this is the replacement diffuser or this one right here that broke and that's turned all orange now so you can see here everything is all sized up and cut just right so that it fits right in there so there it is the new dial diffuser only sitting right about here let's perform a dial alignment an oscillator alignment and an antenna alignment on this radio receiver so here's how I have everything set up I have the little door on the top open here and as you can see door the dial disappears so I have a light set up quite a ways from the dial on the top side and what it's doing is it's reflecting the dial glass onto that little diffuser and that'll allow us to align this from the backside without me having to move the camera a hundred times to do this on linemen so that worked out quite well this is sitting right on top of the bench right now and if I had to have a second camera I'd have to have about a 10 foot tripod to get it over top and focus down on the down so this worked out really nice for this little radio receiver it's kind of an awkward radio to the line on camera just the way it everything's set up and then of course you have to remove the needle and everything to service the thing so you have to align the dial in the radio itself which is a little bit difficult in some cases so this just happened to work out okay so the very first thing that I've done is you can see the needle here I'll just zoom on in so you can see the needle is right there okay so I'll move the needle from the front side here you can see it moving so what I did to align the needle here is I move the capacitor you can see the tuning cap right over here completely meshed right there so it completely meshes on that one side of the five on the 55 and on the other side of the dial it's a really small tuning knob on the top yourself takes a while to move it from end to end that would be one improvement that they could have made to this and it as you see that it stops right at this end of the zero here so what I did is I put that the little needle on and I just made it so that it moves from end to end evenly and we'll see if we can get a dial alignment with that that's most likely the way that they intended it because it stops on each side of each number at one end of the dial right so that right there is the end that's as far as it'll go so what I've done is I've taken the dial string you can point to this without burning myself on a blazing-hot tube here that tube is incredibly odd so what I've done is I've taken the dial string and I've just looped it through this one loop at first so it went through this and then the dial string came on the outside here and then came over here so that allows me to move the dial pointer back and forth on the dial string without cutting the dial string and leaving this in one spot so I can move the needle to where it needs to be on the dial so I moved it rate to this point and then what I did is I rotate this to the other end you see this here I've rotate this to the other end and then I check to make sure that it's on the other side of the zero like we saw and I would just very gently move this back and forth until I got that into alignment once I had that then I took the little string and then I put it over this little area here and that'll stop the actual needle from slipping on the string so there'll be no slipping at that point now so now this is pretty solid and you can just leave it like this you don't need to put any glue or anything on it you just leave it like that a lot of people like to fasten this stuff with glue and that just makes a total pain for a lineman or to get this off the next time you need to so it's just looped through and the tension of the string will hold the string into the pointer so no problems there so the very first thing that we want to do here is we want to make the dial track correctly so what I need to do is feed the oscillator or feed the the antenna section of the radio with a 1600 kilohertz or 1.6 megahertz signal and they need to move this dial to 1.6 megahertz so what I'll do is I'll move this rate where it's supposed to be so you can see right here is 1400 this little notch is 1500 and then this one right here is 1600 not be about rate Center so what I need to do now is turn my signal generator to 1.6 megahertz or 1600 am sorry so we're going to do that and as you can hear just turn the volume up it's close but it's not on so in order to adjust that what I need to do is adjust this one setting right here so this is the oscillator and this is the antenna and this'll allow me to ask that to align the dial accuracy correctly so that it'll track right so what I'm gonna do is just get a screwdriver here and move this see see how you can move that raid off frequency and that's about as close as I'm going to get right about there now this Peaks the signal up so this is the antenna section so what I need to do now is turn this just for maximum noise really just tell it's it's at its most sensitive point you can hear it's picking up right there and here it just goes away right about there is its most sensitive point so now what I need to do is move the dial you can even hear the statics picked up there's no antenna on this just the signal generator in here it's already trying to receive listen no antenna not you can see already it's really starting to work well so what I want to do now is move this back down to 600 this is the other alignment point so I need to align this at 600 a.m. so right about there is going to be 600 zoom on into that you see it's right on top of six 600 right there so now in order to align that I need to turn this one right here this little one right down in here so I'll turn my signal generator to 600 so that's 600 kilohertz so see how far away that is so you can see that's quite a ways off sometimes there are way over here right this is actually not far off so I'll put this right on top right about there is a strongest that's right on top so now what I'm going to do is turn this until I move the dial right on top so you can see I can move the dial around if I wanted to say 600 was over here okay see you can hear 600 there now so I need to bring this to this point right here so now I'll move this right there now I need to go back up to the upper end and make sure that the dial accuracy is correct if not I have to readjust again so I'll move this back up to 1600 how to zoom on in here right about there so I'll put my signal generator now to 1600 and it's very close so adjust the tracking here again [Music] it did move and I'll adjust the sensitivity again so the antenna adjustment here so this will make it more sensitive we read about there is at its max it's very close so now I'll move back down 600 worrying about their turn the signal generator to 600 look at how close that is now I'll just make sure that this is spot-on did move just a little so when you're aligning this you're looking for the deepest tone that's another thing that I should explain so when you're tuning this you'll hear there's kind of a staticky noise and it'll kind of as you get on to frequency the static will go away and the tone gets nice and deep that's what you're looking for so here I'll tune this off and I'll give you an idea here turn this up a little bit okay see how that's kind of more there's more static in there and how it's a lighter tone you're looking for the deepest sound and we passed it [Music] right there is the deepest tone and that's right on so now we'll check the dial accuracy again at one point six so we'll just put that back up there one point six megahertz or 1600 kilohertz if you like so I'll turn this back up and move over here so we're just about there the next little bump is 1600 right on no problems whatsoever so I'll just make sure everything's peaked up one more time [Music] that's the deepest tone right there and I think that's it and that was it for the down line look you know how well that aligned up so what we'll do is we'll check the dial accuracy at other portions of the band so I'll try 600 again all right so 600 kill Urtz back down we go perfect so let's try another frequency okay let's try 900 900 kilohertz okay so let's move this up to 900 look at that dial accuracy spot on having dial accuracy like this and a radio a lot of the times you'll align both ends and it'll be sitting here or it'll be sitting here when you want to you know try it right in the center but the dial accuracy on this is just so nice and that could be attributed to those really good capacitors too as well so I'm using those you know really high quality mica capacitors where they had those other ones in there and of course now the frequency drift of this radio receiver is going to be absolutely minimized so it's gonna be a really nice radio to listen to and that's it the thing is ready to listen to now at this point so let's see how sensitive this thing is I'll hook it up to an antenna and we'll cruise through the dial let's check out this radio receivers performance right now it's the daytime here so that means that we're just going to be hearing local radio stations and some flame thrower radio stations when I say flamethrower radio stations mean really high-powered AM radio stations at nighttime lots and lots of radio stations are all over the band so that means that there's multiple radio stations on one frequency in some cases just because they're all coming in at the same time and that's known as conditions sometimes known as skip conditions so right now it's that time of day when basically only local radio stations and as I say very high-powered AM radio stations can be heard so it'll give us a better idea of the sound quality of this and the band really isn't so incredibly crowded now when you're looking at the band you'll notice in some cases you'll hear radio stations that might be on either side of the knotch and that's because where the lens is so if the lens was right in front of it the needle would be right in front the dial accuracy on this radio really is quite incredible it's extremely accurate so you know if I was listening to AM 600 it would be right on that mark yet on the camera it might look off to one side again that's just because we're the the lenses sitting so I'll turn up the radio here and let's take a listen to some stations this thing has really nice sound they did a really nice job putting the speaker system in this together it's set back a little bit and it looks like they have a little bit of a chamber in there so they spent some time tuning this thing it really does sound nice view him as he long turn p [Music] the you see German impeachment [Music] [Applause] god yeah the sky is falling there lady right can feed on ABC because it has a larger discount just let me go so as you can hear it has really good receive and the radio was working incredibly well and again this is just local radio stations no nighttime radio station no skip conditions or anything like that the sound quality of this thing is excellent they really did a nice job tuning the speaker system in this especially with that little chamber in there so I imagine if this was sitting up against a wall or something like that that would probably even enhance the sound lots of bass and the speaker so they did a really nice job putting this thing together and as I said before the dial accuracy accuracy on this thing is just incredible very spot-on now again it may not have been that great maybe it was when it rolled right off the factory floor it was like this with those brand new capacitors but with those mic as I'm sure that you know really helped the dial accuracy and this thing has been on for hours and the dial drift is zip there's no dial drift in this thing whatsoever so very impressed with this Rodgers majestic radio this little chairside really turned out to be a very nice design and now for the answer to the last videos trivia question the question was what is this thing what does it do if you're just tuning in now you're gonna want to take a look at this thing and take your best guess because I'm gonna answer this in just a moment alright you're gonna want to pause the video right about now or you're gonna hear the answer if you're just tuning in so those of you that answered vacuum high-voltage relay you've got it correct this is for working up in the high kilovolt range and the reason that they have a vacuum in here is to stop arc over and things like that so you can see a little exhaust tip on the top I had some people say it looks like a glass distributor kind of does actually it really does look like the glass distributor so the piece that's missing out at the bottom is this thing that's the coil and I guess the person that removed this from service or had this coil at some time it doesn't really look like there's any time on this thing who has removed this from circuit pulled this contact right off and there's just a little piece of wire left so way way way back when I soldered this new lead into here and i managed to resurrect this coil which is kind of nice so what I'm going to do is get a power supply set up and I'll activate this relay I'll be right back okay so I'll slide the coil in it's a real nice fit just like so I'll turn on my high voltage power supply stakes around 50 volts to turn this thing on actually just under 50 volts so here we go closer shot of that so you can see that this one here is the center contact and you can see that this would be the normally closed and this would be the normally open position so it's a double pole double throw relay all completely sealed so everything that moves is inside a vacuum or a gas filled environment so usually what they do is they either vacuum these things out or again they fill them with a gas so that they don't arc over inside this one looks like it has a getter on the side but hasn't been flashed and the reason that they may not have flashed that getter is because it's gonna put this big spot here and maybe it would create a path to arc through that spot I'm really not quite sure why they didn't flash that getter but there it is high-voltage vacuum relay and now for the next videos trivia question what service was this device used in bonus points for its actual part number so I'd be looking for a CV number and it's frequency range you can see the size of this little fella is pretty small this will plug into it Christel socket that's how small it is it perfectly fits one of those little ceramic crystal sockets and some bonus trivia for the next video we know that mica capacitors are used in oscillator circuits and circuitry that requires very high stability with temperature change so we all know if we use just standard style capacitors in an oscillator circuit temperature variation will cause the oscillator to move off frequency either you know high or low depending on how the circuit is built so capacitors are extremely important whenever you're dealing with circuits that are very very accurate and mica capacitors are one solution to keep oscillators nice and stable and you know any type of a circuit that you need stability in where there's a lot of temperature movement here is another type of mica capacitor this is very close to the one that I installed in that radio they kind of look a little bit like dominoes and I've talked about how to read these capacitors in other videos now these capacitors here that I removed out of that radio just for trivia sake out of that radio what type of capacitors are these so you can see they're coding is very similar to this mica capacitor right here but what is inside these capacitors this one here is a really big hint we'll take a look will break one of these open in the next video and we'll take a look inside this and see exactly what's inside and we'll also do some measurements to see if it leaks before we even open the thing up the capacitor tester will tell us really what's inside this thing thanks for stopping by the lab today I hope you enjoyed this video involving this Rogers chairside radio if you did enjoy this video you can let me know by giving me a big thumbs up then hang around there'll be many more videos like this coming in the near future we'll be taking a look at vacuum tube and solid-state electronics alike so there'll be a lot of repairs restoration troubleshooting procedures and electronic design on this channel so if you haven't subscribed now would be a good time to do that as well if you're interested in taking your electronics knowledge to the next level and learning electronics in a very different ineffective way you're gonna want to check out my ongoing electronics course on patreon I'll put the link just below this video's description and I'll also pin the link right at the top of the comments section there are a lot of videos on patreon involving designing with circuit boards designing with vacuum tubes point-to-point all sorts of very interesting things and right now we're building our very own customized test equipment to make troubleshooting a lot easier so you're definitely gonna want to check that out alright until next time take care bye for now you

Channel: Mr Carlson's Lab

Views: 358,986

Rating: 4.8780618 out of 5

Keywords: electrical restoration, electric restoration, radio repair, radio restoration, learn electronics, teach electronics, vacuum tube radio repair, electronics repair, fix electronics, test equipment repair, mr carlson's lab electronics, restore electronics

Id: ISbidethQyc

Length: 119min 47sec (7187 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/linotype]

Mr. Carlson strikes me a as a guy that cant hold down a job because his OCD gets in the way of his ability to do his work.

There was one video where for some reason he refused to acknowledge what IC he used in the project. In the comments he was like “I can’t remember” and “I’ll have to check and get back to you” (he didn’t). He went so far as to obscure the markings on the IC in the video. I found a good frame where the circuit was clear, did a bit of reverse engineering and discovered it was a very generic and very common ULN2003 driver.

I still can’t figure out what his motive was for hiding it. Was he ashamed of his choice? Was he looking to manufacture and sell his boards? Weird.

His videos are full of weird omissions like this. He’ll be going super detailed in a project, then skip showing an important step and act like it didn’t happen. It’s so confusing when you know what he’s talking about and suddenly something that you knew was going to be difficult just appears completed. He never shows himself failing, and it bugs me.

Then I discovered shango066, that guy is pure Mr. Carlson’s Lab antidote.