[Milsurplus] sloppy contractor OH work on boatanchors

[boeing377 at aol.com]

Anyone else noticed some of the incredibly sloppy OH work done post war 
on our beloved boatanchors? Two instances come to mind. The APN 9 Loran 
A receivers all had to be modified to read a new pulse repetition (PRR) 
rate (the "S" rate) employed after WW 2. Prior to the mod they could 
only read L and H rates as I recall although I may have this completely 
backwards. They were used a lot in the Viet Nam war and many were 
modified. The mod work was done by private contractors and was a real 
butcher job. The hacked a hole in the front panel, looked like it was 
done with a hand held router, not a drill, hole was only approximately 
round. They put a DPDT toggle in the hole and used, in many cases, red 
nail polish to crudely hand letter S and L on either side of the toggle 
switch and then painted a crude wobbly line up to the old rotary switch 
that selected L or H. The chassis wiring work was ugly too but it all 
worked OK. I saw a few presumably done by a different contractor that 
had neat stencilled white lettering and a very crisp straight line, but 
these were not nearly as common as the nail polish versions

  The second example I saw at the old Alameda NAS during the early 
1970s. There was a DOD sealed bid auction for OH'd ART 13s, ex Navy. 
there were at least several hundred there, all crated. A few examples 
had been hacked open and another ugly sight revealed itself. Couldn't 
really tell what was done inside, but the outsides had been so crudely 
painted that even crusty grime had been sprayed over. Some meter faces 
and dials had slight overspray too. Looked like ZERO prep work. These 
ended up going for somewhere around $22 each. On the plus side there 
were a much larger lot of OH'd LM freq meters at the auction that were 
indistinguishable from brand new. Unfortunately both the ART 13s and 
LMs were sold in huge lots frustrating guys like me who only wanted a 
couple. They probably ended up being scrapped.