My First Predicta

[Chris K]

Hi all...thanks everyone for your invaluable assistance, expertise, troubleshooting and interest. It looks like the issue with signal strength was my RF modulator. It's the little white cased, $25 unit you can find just about anywhere. I got another modulator brand that, while cheap, has an adjustable RF signal output so I got enough signal strength to get a great picture. I needed to adjust the first and second sound IF coils to dial in good sound quality and eliminate buzz. The picture looks great. I wish I could take a decent photo of it to post but no matter what I do, there's banding and strobing. On to a cosmetic cleanup of the case. The brass, of course, is modestly corroded and pitted. It's right on the edge of "ehhhh, maybe I should just leave it...ehhhh, the rest of it looks so good, do I really want to leave it like that?". I do have some very good looking brass colored paint. I'm thinking of striping and polishing back to bare metal, adding a coat of filler/primer paint, wet sanding and top coating with the brass paint. The case is in great shape. Just a few edge wear marks I need to color in with a furniture scratch marker, coat it with some wax and it should look good. I debated what to do with the CRT enclosure. I have almost exact color matching epoxy based spray paint that would make it look showroom fresh but the same rubbing compound I used on the safety plastic did a pretty nice job of cleaning the plastic shell so I'm gonna leave it for now. I'll post some pictures when It's all done. Thanks again to all who contributed your time and wisdom!