Ekco AC77

[Yorkie]

Thanks for reading my post and for your kind comments Tony.

I can certainly recommend those little belt sanders - they come with three types of 'heads' and have a quick release lever to make belt fitting easy. You just move the lever, remove the old belt, fit the new one and move the lever back to tension the belt.

I'm intending to paint the chassis as it was before Tony, but of course at grounding points I'll clean the paint off to make good contact.

I've sprayed the chassis with acid etch primer, which I'm impressed with. It's from the e-bay shop of a firm of auto factors who all all sorts of aerosol spray paint and sundries, and they do a twin pack of 500mL aerosols for £13.00 post free. Very good spray heads that spray about a 4" wide strip at about 8 - 10" distance. Quick drying too. You can recoat in 15 mins, then have to leave it 24Hrs before applying the top coat. I put the heater on in the workshop at 8am this morning, then when I went out at 11am it was nice and toasty and up to temperature for spraying. If we get a sunny day as forecast tomorrow, I'll apply the top coat in the greenhouse as it's much more dust free. I'll use Halford's Ford 'Dove Grey' which Gary tipped me off about as being a very good match for Ekco chassis of this vintage.

The link to the auto factor paint firm is here:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/271356235244?s...K:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

I've attached a pic of the primed chassis.

This set has some peculiar construction features.

For example, if you look at the pic of the screened lead to the earth socket, you'll see that apart from the screening being grounded at the earth socket and at the chassis (on top and bottom via the grommet), there is also a tandem yellow wire grounded at both ends, running adjacent to the screened wire. Why yellow I wonder, particularly since yellow is used as the HT supply from the power supply chassis, whereas the ground lead from the PSU is black. Huh - what's that all about?

I've never seen this method of screening a wire either - it has close-wound 26SWG tinned copper wire. Effective enough but I've only ever seen woven mesh screening before.

I have to say that the standard of design construction of this set is in my view very poor in many respects. Notwithstanding that it's almost 80 years old, the paint on the chassis is just a few microns thick and can be flicked off with a fingernail. Perhaps it reflects the poor state of the economy in the mid 30s depression era - corner cutting left, right and centre?

Design wise, one end of the chassis has quite a low density of components - the other end has them all cramped together. There are two manky 'tag-boards' which is a bit of a misnoma because the boards (flimsy 1mm thick paxolin) don't have any tags on them - just a few slots with the wire ends of components trapped in the slots with blobs if solder to the next wire. To try to be in keeping, I've therefore replaced them with two similar sized little turret-tag boards, re-using a couple of wirewound resistors which were in spec, and re-stuffing caps. (Only one side of the new boards is shown - there are components on the reverse side too). I recently saw inside a circular Ekco AD65 - appalling - just a rat's nest of untidy wiring and from the same vintage. What a contrast is the wonderfully designed A22, which is a delight to work on, has several novel features, and must be Ekco's high water mark. Or so it seems to me.

Hope that's of interest.