DuMont Blonde Revere Restoration

[IsthmusTV]

Hi all,

I was able to make good progress over the rainy weekend on my blonde DuMont Revere RA-113. This is the set that I picked up at the beginning of August and wrote about in this thread: http://www.videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=258995

I had the advantage of Phil Nelson's excellent write-up on the restoration of his RA-113 which was a great guide (thanks Phil)! Here's the chassis on the workbench before I started:



I decided to replace the electrolytics under the chassis instead of restuffing, since there was plenty of room. The modern replacements are so much smaller!


The flyback looks great. The new HV caps are from Just Radios in Canada:



After restringing the dial cord (which fortunately was easier than I thought it would be) I decided to try a power up with a metered variac. No smoke or strange noises, and current draw was just under two amps.


I got nice clear audio and a very dim raster:


I recalled that both HV rectifiers tested very weak, so replaced them both. Then things progressed quickly.


Here's after adjusting the ion trap:


And after adjusting the horizontal frequency and the other usual stuff:



I'm very pleased with the nice, bright picture! The video response is great enough that I see the color interference dots. There are still 4-5 paper caps yet to replace. The picture is somewhat canted, so I need to adjust the yoke and/or focus coil. And as some of you know, I have what I hope is a new old stock (or rebuilt) 17BP4 that I bought on eBay due to arrive on Thursday. There seems to be plenty of life left in the original 17AP4, but it will be nice to have a spare. The tuning eye tube is very dim, so I'll need to find a replacement.

This was a lot of fun and it's almost a let down at how easy it was

I'm looking forward to watching bandersen restore the one he's got!

-Clark