[Boatanchors] Polyester Capacitors in Johnson Ranger?

[Michael D. Harmon]

I am in the process of rebuilding a Johnson Ranger transmitter which had 
been butchered and stripped before it fell into my hands.  Its previous 
owner was a splatter jockey who clipped, tacked, tweaked and 
cold-soldered anything on the poor old girl which could be.  Knobs were 
gone, mod transformer was missing (big wax pool underneath its previous 
location where it had melted down), all shields were missing, wires were 
clipped under the chassis, and capacitors tacked in place where there 
weren't supposed to be any.  He even had removed the mike jack and 
tacked the mic input wire to the key jack.  I guess he was trying to 
hook up a crude PTT.

Anyway, I was inventorying the caps with the intent to replace them, and 
I noticed a number of turquoise axial lead caps which were marked 
Sangamo Type 33.  I did some research and found that these are polyester 
caps.  The solder jobs look professional, but I thought polyester caps 
came along well after the late Fifties when the Ranger was built (yes, 
it was a factory job - all rivets).  In the early Sixties I was a high 
school kid with a terminal case of screwdriver-itis.  The TV repairman 
used to bring old chassis by the house and unload them for me to 
cannibalize, much to the chagrin of my mom!  The only kind of caps I 
remember seeing back then were molded micas, disk ceramics, nasty, 
dripping wax-paper caps, and a lot of black beauties, which were a 
sealed wax paper, foil, and oil abomination.

Could these caps be OEM?  Were polyester caps available back in the late 
Fifties?  If so, they couldn't have been cheap.  If Johnson engineers 
put them in their transmitters at the factory, the company must have 
believed that they were worth the extra cost.

I'm probably going to solid-state the power supplies, primarily to 
reduce the heat in the cabinet, as well as reduce some of the HV slump.  
I'll probably add some of the nicer mods like PTT, but I don't intend to 
try to redesign the audio system for 30-15,000 Hz response.  Maybe I'm 
wrong, but it seems like a slippery slope to me.

Mike, WB0LDJ
mharmon at att dot net