Restoring a golden Grundig Majestic (SO161Ua) 1960's vintage tube console, w/record, reel, Part 1

[Music] today we have this lovely Grundig Majestic cabinet here it actually does work a little bit [Music] the tuning eye tube even does function a little bit here you can see that the lines here move in and out when I change the tuning [Music] it's not as bright as it should be though I'm kind of disappointed this top here seems like plastic not glass they usually meet them at a glass but this seems to be plastic which is uh going to be difficult to clean up I think the glass ones always look perfect when you clean them we've got this really cute little tape player here and when I press start it doesn't seem to do anything I don't know if it's not connected right now or what got some interesting hieroglyphs here when you press these buttons colors change here and I'm not sure what those three symbols mean I know one of them's play one of those record I don't know what that middle one is wow and uh got a switch here too we're gonna have to play with that and get it working this is really cute vintage microphone made by Grundig has its own little built-in stand here so you can set it up and I guess talk into it or record your own music through it or something I can't wait to see if we can get that working of course we've got a little record player in here too this looks like it's made for 10 inch records and we will find out if we can get it to play a 12-inch record but this is a really nice little Auto uh player here that's also got a feature here to drop a second disc down or probably just a second disc so you could play two discs at the same time or one after the other and here's the back of the unit which we're going to be opening up and checking out inside this is a Grundig Majestic stereo console so161 UA here is the list of all the tubes and we have the connection for the phonograph and a tape recorder output I'm not sure where the uh tape player feeds in so we're going to have to see if we can figure something out with that but it's a beautiful label here and good very very good condition [Music] there's the antenna hookup so here's the rear right panel removed there's some speakers in here and I'm beginning to see why the why the real player doesn't work because there is a separate power cord for it which is not plugged into anything well that's lovely and there's this funny box here that I suppose connects to the real player to give you access to probably recording and stuff like that I don't know why it's sideways here and not in the middle although it looks like somebody tried to plug something in here so maybe maybe this is where we can actually connect that microphone I don't know we'll find out and then brood in here is the actual radio unit and if I pull this back cover off it'll unplug the power here that's kind of their safety feature so I just have it kind of strung open but I can see a connector lying in the middle here that black thing which is not hooked up to anything if I can get to that that's an interesting connector oh it's a din five okay and that seems to be coming from yes that is coming from the Real Player and because it's not connected we're not going to get any signal from it so that mystery will be easy to fix I hope and then finally in the left panel which is the right when you're facing backwards we've got more speakers back here and the uh record player so very simple Construction here guarantee you these caps are probably are bad this is uh electrolytic so we're gonna have to replace those potentially I guess that's probably part of the crossover so I better replace that of course there's another one over here as well so we've got a little bit of a lay of the land here see see what we can do to Spruce this up a bit and get it actually functioning it's always fun to do a little sleuthing here and try to figure things out so this is a one of the tube retainers which fell off of one of the tubes here looks like probably this guy's the one missing it these are very dangerous if the tube is missing this thing can actually fall inside the metal chassis here and short out hundreds of volts and cause damage serious damage seen it in other consoles where one of those shorted circuit out and blew up a capacitor and caused a fire we don't want that then in here I discovered a rubber thing and that is a broken o-ring uh or maybe you called a broken belt which I guarantee you goes on this uh Real Player somewhere so that definitely needs to be fixed unless they actually fixed it before and just left the broken piece in there we're gonna have to figure out where that goes there's a variety of Hardware that fell inside of here I'm not sure if that's from this thing or some kid putting Hardware inside we'll see and some other damper thing here that looks like of some kind of vibration damper made out of rubber it fell out so see if we can get that put back into and some more sleuthing and shows some more interesting features here one is that the lid here which moves up and down uh you can see a nice crack at the top there where stuff easily can fall into this console so that's kind of a interesting design here that if you put something on top of the lid and then you open the lid it will fall all the way in and another thing that happens is there is this spring which holds the lid on and it's really noisy why is it so noisy well there's a pulley up there and the cable clearly has fallen off the pulley see it all the way up here that that cable is no longer on the pulley so we'll have to get our hands way deep in there somehow and fix that pulley as well actually that might not be too hard to fix because it looks like this feral here can come right off the spring so I'll go ahead and fix that right now okay I've got that string back on the pulley way up there and now we are night and day nice and quiet now if it was up to me what I would do is put a switch here maybe a reed switch or something to turn everything on that way when you open the cover all the way power turns on you got music as soon as you lift the cover up music stops and as you close the lid everything's off so that would be a really convenient thing to add to this if it was mine now I think some people might want these to be as original as possible in which case I probably wouldn't do that but if I was going to modernize this that would be part number one that I would do is put a switch on that door that would be so cool the other thing I might do is you know you're wondering what this white string is here what in the world is that for there's two of them coming out each side well they're tied to a Switchback here and if you pull that string it switches the position of the switch and what is that switch I would love to tell you but I can't see it from my vantage point so there's something here that says norm and aux uh anybody's guess what Norman Ox are aux usually means auxiliary so but auxiliary what where do I connect it maybe that is something to do with the uh with the source that they decided to add in here because there are two RCA jacks which are highly unusual so maybe this is clearly an after fit and we'll have to see if we can get that to function and so find out whether that works or doesn't work but that's a really strange way to do it and I'd like to understand why they put a switch here is if we can do it without a switch that makes this a lot more fun this whole back panel actually detaches uh here and I was wondering why the FM was a little weak this is why it's weak got a broken connection here that's no problem to fix we'll solder that right back on we'll probably end up having to pull this whole thing out but I have an RCA jack hooked up to the input here and that goes down to my meter which I have on Resistance and I have it on 20 Mega ohms now and I got nothing which means it's either an open circuit or they've got a capacitor the first thing here and I did not see numbers jump so it's probably a small capacitor but let's flip this from aux to Norm and still no change here so it might be a really small capacitor coupling it which is good because we might be able to forego the switch and simply add the various inputs together we'll see okay you still have my RCA cable connected and I turn the power on and I have the switch set to Norm right now again this is not a switch that came with this unit so this is a an add-on touching that thing I get nothing but when I flip the aux lo and behold I hear a buzz and so that means when uh this is flipped to aux then you can use the RCA inputs and the question is why in the world would you put a switch inside here which is so hard to get to when you might be able to do it a simpler way and so I guess I'll pull this thing apart and see how they got that wired up uh and see if we can come up with something simpler that doesn't need a switch because that would be really cool to have RCA inputs here that might go to a Bluetooth thing for example so you can play music through your phone that would be awesome okay just managed to pull the unit out here from inside so now it is no longer there and I remembered why this old equipment is unbelievably painful and while you probably always had to have a technician to repair anything light bulbs these are burned out how the heck do you get these light bulbs uh repaired well this is the only way you pull the entire thing out this takes like you know an hour to change the light bulb it's unbelievable anyway let's try to get this thing cleaned up we've got a lot of cleaning to do on this front cover here uh and lots of switches to clean lots of pots to try to fix some pieces to oil to make sure that they're turning okay and maybe even some capacitors to redo and I want to see what that little Norm aux switch does so let's take a look at all that okay I already put that tube retainer back on one of the first things I'm going to do is pull out the em84 here figure out how they wanted that to happen there we go the old Telefunken em84 it's pretty weak we've got a new New Old Stock one here this is made in Yugoslavia I didn't have a Telefunken one but let's just put it in there I think I would if it was me I'd rather have a nice bright one than a Telefunken it wasn't bright so we'll get this back in alignment with these is usually kind of tricky so we'll have to turn it on and then align it I did replace both of these light bulbs here already for example here so we've got a new light bulb to go two two new light bulbs to go I would like to replace them with LEDs but I don't have LEDs with that socket right now and the LED colors are kind of weird anyway and people might get picky about that okay okay we can't really access any switches well I guess we can access some switches from this side so the switches are here the question is where are the contacts of course all the electrical connections are here so that means the contacts are on the underside and it's really kind of difficult to get in here but I do want to just kind of spray this stuff wherever I can there's some holes in the side here that are allow me a little bit of access let's see these pots for base and treble are uh pretty much open and so we want to try to make sure we get these cleaned so that they don't make scratchy noise another one down here Okay so the nice thing about this unit is it looks like it has been completely recapped all these yellow capacitors are nice and new and this uh monster capacitor here is new pretty new uh 750 microfarads that's enormous 330 volts I don't know why they chose such an enormous value I think the actual capacitor it came with is 50 microfarads two sections of 50 microfarads so they chose an incredibly large value here which they had to replace the rectifier because that would have definitely blown out the original rectifier there would be an enormous inrush current to charge this huge capacitor here apparently this rectifier can handle it so I guess I'll leave it the way it is although I kind of questioned why they would have done that but all right it's done so there should be a second stage to the capacitor which looks like they're still using the original capacitor uh it's it's still connected and I don't like that because I've actually seen these old capacitors fail to a short and so having the original capacitor still in the circuit is quite a risk uh I'm tempted to take it out of the circuit it's a three section capacitor which is really a painted on wire I guess we got lucky maybe and this one dried out and so it's not arcing and maybe it never will but we definitely need to boost the we should boost the capacitance across those terminals because they're probably uh not doing so well that just means adding some simple capacitors to ground at a couple hundred volts rating so we'll probably do that and anything else in here that we need to handle on this side again I'm really glad that I see a lot of yellow capacitors here because it looks like this thing is probably in pretty good condition sound wise because of those caps I'm not seeing any electrolytic ones down here which is a good good oh here's one I did find an electrolytic capacitor that one's going to need to be replaced probably so I'm going to go ahead and pull that out that's 25 volts and 25 microfarads so I'll go ahead and replace that now [Music] I'm not 100 sure what to do about these RCA inputs I really want to have a Bluetooth signal come in here I have this annoying switch which you can't access from the front of the machine you have to go all the way around back take off the back panel and then switch it which is really stupid but this thing clearly intercepts the signal coming from the switches here uh the main switches and then goes to this auxiliary switch and lets you select whether you're going to take uh your main signal or the RCA auxiliary signal it's an interesting idea but I really want to find a way to do this without the switch I'll have to think about that soon [Music] foreign this cover is indeed plastic we'll clean it up but we got to be careful what we use on it can't use Windex probably because it'll damage the plastic I'll have to be real careful polishing this and cleaning it up unfortunately the foam did cause deterioration did deteriorate over time and chemically damaged the paint in a couple of spots here uh where it was touching the foam so I guess that was not a very uh nice not a very good place to put the foam right on the lettering so that's basically irreparable but we got it off and we'll be able to clean some more inside some deep cleaning here if you will okay now we want to get the turntable out so I'm going to take these wires out all right this guy's already loose now I battled with this thing for quite a while there are three screws in here that are holding it down one of them on this side can't even really see it here is in the wood uh there's a screw it's just a nut way back here that you just can't quite see right there and that one can be released from the turntable by moving it sideways there's another screw which you can't see again right about right up under here and there's one all the way at the front and it turns out you have to remove the nuts on that to get it out so that back one wasn't so hard but the front one I had to jam my arm all the way in there I think it's virtually impossible to get it back on we'll see It'll take a lot of patience but once you get those released you can come to the futuristic looking turntable and pretty much lift it out carefully I'll do this with two hands but this is that screw on the top side which is sort of a t nut shape and that goes into a hole here to catch that and hold it down now if you're wondering what these bizarre little plastic Things Are they're actually a lock the turntable in place when you're moving the console and that pushes some springs on the bottom and just pushes the spring into position so that it doesn't let the turntable wiggle up and down too much we don't really need to play with those right now I think so pull that out got to get it greased up and oiled foreign [Music] here's the Real Player I want to actually turn it on so I can unwind this whole tape and take it off otherwise it's going to be kind of awkward to remove here so I've got it plugged in now if I turn it to one side I get an M light which I guess means mono this might mean stereo and I get a little bit of a hum sounds like a Transformer home and this really cool tuning eye tube indicator comes on hard to see the green there but it's really nice nice and bright actually if I hit start nothing happens if I hit rewind nothing happens forward nothing happens and I don't know what these things do again let's say we had it on that which might be play but it's still not doing anything [Music] as I noted before there is a rubber belt that is broken down there and so it could be that this thing will not function for two reasons one it needs to be oiled it's a little tight here and the second is that that belt is broken and these real players are notorious for not working right so uh they are just an awful amount of Maintenance to keep them working so more than likely this thing needs a pretty good overhaul and we're just gonna have to pull it out it is super heavy I guess I'm gonna have to undo the screws here and open this lid further because I think I have to lift it straight out and it's it's pretty deep actually in there and it's very heavy who was a beast man I think it was awful getting it out so we got the tape deck out the radio out and the uh funny player out and so now we can start cleaning it's incredibly Dusty and messy in there we're gonna have to wipe everything down with Furniture restore and hopefully that will do something make it look awesome it's got a lot of work to do here to try to make this thing look nice but it will look very nice in the end [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: JoyeMusic.com

Views: 13,557

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Id: utCew9H2ELo

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 22 2022