A Day Spent Stringing

[Nowhere-Man]

Today I thought the battle was lost. I was cleaning up a Bush transistor radio and needed to pop the dial knob off to get behind the PCB. I was caught off guard as the string that wound around the lower knob gradually slackened and next thing I knew it turned into a whole new stringing operation. I had no diagram as it just happened.

Anyway, I was soon finding all sorts of problems. The dial would pull one way and not the other and so on. I got to the point I didn't think I had a clue. The last radio I strung was a 1939 TRF so not a lot of experience.

In the end, I concluded I didn't have much chance of getting it as it was before so I started afresh with ways I could possibly do it my own way. And it worked. Not quite sure how I did it but it ended with the spring and my needle nosed pliers so the spring has been stretched out a bit. The positions and the winding is a bit different, especially the way it's routed but I was amazed to find it worked. On turning the tumbler dial at the top, the wheel on the condenser moved to left and right. So, I was very happy about that.

Anyone find stringing difficult? Anyone ever given up and tried to just do the job an alternative way?

I have a bit of soldering to do and I do need a new face dial (the sticker part) but the Bush radio should soon be active again.

[Alan Douglas]

For US radios, Howard Sams published several booklets of dial-stringing diagrams. I presume there was a continuing demand for them.

[Radio Fixer]

Done a few without a diagram and had it working nicely but turning the knob clockwise the pointer moved to the left instead of to the right.

Oh! dear, start again.

Gary

[tiv48]

I have done a few Phillips sets that have caused me to use rather bad language .
Rob T

[Refugee]

Philips sets have two tuning cords and they are very fiddly to work on. It took me well over an hour and lots of rough diagrams..
You have to take the pointer off to get the chassis out without snapping the cord.
Necklace cord from a handy-craft shop works.

[Radio Fixer]

The first thing I do when I remove a chassis for major work is to make my own sketches of the dial cord. It has got me out of trouble later when it snapped. For a quick fix I just chance it.

Gary

[Old Sparky]

Re-stringing dial cords isn't my favourite job, either. Getting the tension and direction right sometimes requires several attempts for one thing. Some radios, especially Philips and maybe those large Grundig multi-speaker sets seem to employ difficult cord routing, etc.!!

[Mark Hennessy]

A few weeks back I was fixing a Tandberg set - a valve table job. While the stringing was straightforward in layout and didn't need any attention from me, I was impressed with the way they'd used a length of thin steel wire between the pointer and the drum. The rest was conventional cord with the expected tension spring. But of course, the steel wire isn't prone to stretching like normal cord, which helps to ensure the RF alignment doesn't drift. This one was spot on after all these years.

Although it's probably something that everyone else has already seen, I hadn't come across it before, and I was impressed

[gary_crutchley]

I have a Cossor that I had difficulty in re-stringing. It took absolutely ages, but I got there in the end.

[radioman]

A few weeks back I was fixing a Tandberg set - a valve table job. While the stringing was straightforward in layout and didn't need any attention from me, I was impressed with the way they'd used a length of thin steel wire between the pointer and the drum. The rest was conventional cord with the expected tension spring. But of course, the steel wire isn't prone to stretching like normal cord, which helps to ensure the RF alignment doesn't drift.

Yes, I've also seen steel wire plus cord used on a HMV 1124, which was the first valve radio I ever got.

Andy