[Milsurplus] BC-779 Final Report

[Carole White-Connor]

    I want to thank all of you (especially Al Klase) for your help with my
recent BC-779 project. Things ended very well. I figured that I would give
you a final report. Perhaps this will help someone in the future who tackles
one of these beasts.

    Here are some of the things I learned:

    1. The first stop in working on a BC-779 should be Al Parker's
restoration page: http://www.hammarlund.info/SP200.htm. This is a must-read.

    2. The replacement of the caps under the chassis is fairly standard
stuff. Almost every one in my set leaked. About a third of the resistors
were more than 20% out of spec.

    3. The paper or Micramold caps in the cans on top of the chassis were
all leaking badly. T-6 has several, T-4 has two and T-1 has one. Replacement
made a big difference.

    4. Removing the nuts under the chassis, which is necessary to remove the
cans, is a pain. There's not much room to swing a wrench and you can't get a
straight shot at them with a socket-wrench extender. For most of them, I
placed a standard socket on the nut and used a screwdriver of the correct
blade width on the other side of the socket to turn the socket. It worked
well. One nut was too close to the edge of the chassis for that. A small
Craftsman open-ended wrench did the trick.

    5. You have to remove several screws on the side of the cans before the
can will slide off the transformer underneath. Before touching the screws, I
put a drop of oil on each and let it sit for a while. I've heard that if you
force these screws, you can break off the part of the transformer that the
screw rests in.

    6. I removed the RF deck to replace the five paper caps in that deck.
Al's page was a wonderful resource. Even with the deck removed, however,
those caps were somewhat of a pain to get at. I'm glad I did it because
replacement of those caps cleared up my AVC issue.

    7. Alignment of the IFs per the instructions in TM-866 made a big
difference. I don't know if a prior owner had messed with them but the IFs
were way, way off.


Joe Connor