[Boatanchors] Restoration

[L L bahr]

Thanks to everyone giving their views on restoring BA with 3-wire power cords and line fuses.  I'm on track!  All commenting said use a 3-wire line cord but one.  I'm going with the crowd and use 3-wire line cords.  The notion manufacturers today use 2-wire cords makes me nervous.  Most of their products are in plastic cabinets so ground floats.  Not so with these metal boat anchors.  I'm going to use line fuses too.  (I'm still thinking about center tap secondary fuses and in-rush current thermistors.)  Again,  I appreciate the time you took writing me. 

Lee, w0vt 

PS:  Just ordered all new resistors and many caps for my SX-71 restoration.  Had to replace 2 tubes and need to restring one of the 4 dial cords.  Sure hope the IF cans don't need rebuilding.  (They contain 220pf silver micas and 3300 ohm plate resistors.  Time will tell. )  That 455 kHz crystal is really weird looking.  Never ever seen one built like this.  Hope it works too!  I checked a lot of the resistors and most I checked were out of tolerance.  Then you need to deal with the ones you can't measure in-line,  so decided to just not waste time and replace all of them.  That means I'll have to remove the second converter sub chassis to get at it's resistors too.  (I'll be using 1 watt metal oxide resistors to replace all 1/2 watt carbon resistors.)  I can see why a good restoration job would cost $800.  You need at least $100 worth of parts or more plus MANY hours replacing 60 plus resistors and at least 13 caps or more plus alignment and other found problem fixes.  Takes some time removing all the knobs and front panel to just replace a dial cord.  Then you need time checking all the tubes.  Doing all this for hobby fun is one thing, but this would be a drag doing it for a living unless you were WELL PAID for putting up with all this on a daily basis.  Frankly,  I would not do one for $800!  Just not worth it financially .  When finished, it should be worth $1000 but you would be lucky to get $250 to $300 for it.  I'm thinking I'll have close to 100 hours in this project.  I'm doing it because I want a factory spec running SX-71 as I had when I was a kid.  I give credit to guys who do this sort of thing as a business.  Their prices seem high until you analyze how much time they need to put into a project like this.  Then all of a sudden their prices seem low.  Problem is even low prices are higher then many can afford for such a service.  The only alternative is do it yourself or don't do it at all and just look at your potentially restorable radio sitting on a shelf or maybe limping along using it as is and way out of performance specifications.    My SX-71 is RUN 3 and I'll pair it up with a Johnson Viking 1.   dit dit,,, Lee, w0vt