[Heathkit] Frozen bandswitch

[rbethman]

On 10/2/2015 10:24 PM, Whitebear1122 wrote:
> It's interesting to hear that others are experiencing the same thing as me.  I acquired an SB200 a few years back and the bandswitch was frozen.  It was frozen in the shaft coupler.  I was unable to turn it with pliers.  My recommendation is to not force it.  I speak from experience.  I forced the bandswitch and broke it.  I ended up having to find a replacement bandswitch.. sigh.     I have an HW-16 that I recently took off the shelf and found one of the controls frozen.  Not again…..  So I'll use PB Blaster on it.
>
> I used PB Blaster to free up a Johnson VIking Kilowatt Matchbox frozen bandswitch.  It took maybe a week of soaking the crap out of it before it freed up.
>
> The PB Blaster seemed to work well.  I agree with the others, WD-40 didn't do anything to resolve the problem.  It just made a huge mess.
>
> 73, Scott WA9WFA
Scott,

The problem is across the board with loads of the older gear!

This is most likely a better topic for the Boatanchor list!

I went through a small Johnson Matchbox with a frozen bandswitch.

That same year, 2013, I had to take apart an HRO-50 PW Dial.

That HRO-50 had a rough past.  The tuning shaft was so chewed up that I 
ended up filing it down in stages to get the way over tightened set 
screw upsets smoothed out.

I stuck a NOS Black PW Dial on it at the time.  I was doing a complete 
recap on the old girl.  So I wanted to be able to tune it a bit to 
double-check myself as I progressed.  I found one coilset that had 
apparently been dropped.  The Oscillator coil box had a rattle in it.  
The little aluminum "L" bracket had broken off.  If the four single 
letter coilsets didn't match the radio by serial number, I would have 
most likely have gone hunting for parts.

Took some aluminum that already had the same width from a WWII surplus 
wreck of a receiver.  Just had to cut to the proper length. Then the 
pain of soldering the ends of one pi-wound enameled inductor back to the 
point they broke off from the strips that lie in the ceramic on the 
bottom of the coilsets.

It wasn't until this year that I finally got the original PW Dial 
straightened out.  I ended up reaming out the center, and used brass 
tubing from a hobby shop to make an insert to fit the reamed out, (not 
by power or drill!  I have a number of machinist's reamers!), so it is 
finally smooth, the tubing fits with very little clearance to the 
original shaft.  I double checked that against an old National Gearbox 
for their size that wasn't chewed up.  The gear box is toast!

There is just so much that seems to turn up needing a bunch of work, and 
I just am not getting any younger!

Bob - N0DGN