17-11-2015, 04:47 PM
(This post was last modified: 17-11-2015, 05:00 PM by Nowhere-Man.)
Here is a pic that hopefully gives some idea of the circuit mounting. The red capacitors are mine. I use these as they're probably a fair bit cheaper to buy than stuff you'd get on specialist sites. It means for a few pence I can replace a lot of knackered wax capacitors.
This pic gives the best illustration of "The Rail" so far. The Rail appears to be the whole axis of the radio design - a means of neatly tucking away all those bypass capacitors so they don't intrude. Apart from soldering, the components were twisted into place to make a very secure connection.
As you can see, this led to a great deal of repair problems. Removal of the entire rail to create access carried quite a few risks. So easy for something to either get mixed up or even accidental breaks of a circuit connections. Part of this rail is soldered onto chassis or tube pins as well. In the end, I decided to take an easier way around it and try and solder around the rail. You can see the black leads where this was done - it had to be wire that was a bit rigid so it would support the film cap that was replacing the old wax. Needless to say, most of the wax caps were so degraded and dirty they had to be snipped out and chemically cleaned to reveal the rating, typically 0.05 or similar.
At any rate, I take the view this was just a very bad design idea by the manufacturer. It restricted access to most of the tube bases. It made it very awkward to work on the radio and actually trace the circuit. It involves soldering in very awkward spots and enough to try the patience of the Prophet Job. A good deal of this work was done cursing and cussing.
This pic gives the best illustration of "The Rail" so far. The Rail appears to be the whole axis of the radio design - a means of neatly tucking away all those bypass capacitors so they don't intrude. Apart from soldering, the components were twisted into place to make a very secure connection.
As you can see, this led to a great deal of repair problems. Removal of the entire rail to create access carried quite a few risks. So easy for something to either get mixed up or even accidental breaks of a circuit connections. Part of this rail is soldered onto chassis or tube pins as well. In the end, I decided to take an easier way around it and try and solder around the rail. You can see the black leads where this was done - it had to be wire that was a bit rigid so it would support the film cap that was replacing the old wax. Needless to say, most of the wax caps were so degraded and dirty they had to be snipped out and chemically cleaned to reveal the rating, typically 0.05 or similar.
At any rate, I take the view this was just a very bad design idea by the manufacturer. It restricted access to most of the tube bases. It made it very awkward to work on the radio and actually trace the circuit. It involves soldering in very awkward spots and enough to try the patience of the Prophet Job. A good deal of this work was done cursing and cussing.
