[Boatanchors] Polyester Capacitors in Johnson Ranger?

[Jim Brannigan]

Mike,
You have some work ahead of you.
Phil Salas wrote about the Ranger http://www.ad5x.com/, I followed his 
advise.


Good luck
Jim

>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
> _______________________________________________