A real train wreck of an Admiral 19A11

[Kamakiri]

I just love working on something that was repaired by someone who "really knew what they were doing". Enter this Admiral 19A11 chassis.

Here's the beginnings of the story.....

See the cap I'm holding in the first shot? Apparently it was "too tight" for the guy to squeeze his 55 watt Weller blowtorch of an iron in between two adjacent tube sockets, so he wired the cap all the way across to the other side of the chassis and zip tied it into place on the tuner body with no insulation. Doing it once is bad, doing it with half a dozen is a freaking mess. See that Sangamo cap in the bottom right? There's another. I said "screw it", and started cutting zip ties and moving the jungle of wires out of the way to see what this guy was thinking.

And I know he was using a 55 watt Weller because not only are there scorch marks all over everything where he couldn't get it to fit in to do the work, but it melted the pins off of some of the tube sockets where he tried to desolder the wires, and he ended up tacking on wires to the pins of the tubes. And of course all of the components that those were attached to were relocated elsewhere.

As I begin to straighten out all of the cross wired circuits and careless capacitor replacement (20 and 30 uF? Let's put in all 47s), I'm beginning to understand what's going on here. First, the guy cut out and tested caps several at a time, then stuck them back in or replaced them by looking at the Sams, and got several values wrong, and grounded them where he felt like. But that's not the worst....

I'm redoing a bunch of the wiring to the filter can and setting everything right, when I notice something that I didn't see under a mess of wiring before. See that hole in the chassis on the far left in the second pic? That's where the horizontal size control USED TO BE!! Somehow the guy tried to wire around it and jumper connections to both the vertical size and horizontal hold control to bypass it. I have NO idea HOW this set ever worked, but I was told it did.