[Milsurplus] Most Difficult Bandswitch Clean

[Rob Flory]

I've heard about the legendary difficult recaps like S-28 and SCR-300(lived
through that one) but for difficult band switch cleaning I am going to
nominate the RBB/RBC.  I just bit the bullet and went through my RBC after
procrastinating for about 10 years.

Having grown the antenna farm quite a bit, and played with some modern
radios attached to said antennas for a few months, the romance of a jumpy
receiver just ain't what it used to be.  I'm perfectly happy to play with
unstable radios if that is how they were built, but that is not the case
for the RBC.

So, just to be able to spray some gunk on the band switch you are looking
at removing about 20 screws to remove interior covers(after removing the
radio from the chassis).  Then you have to remove 4 boxes, again about 20
screws per box to extract it and then open it.  This is after extracting
the band switch shaft.  There's 14 wires to be removed from the boxes but
thankfully they are lugged and not soldered so you don't have to mess up
the "pretty".

If you want to exercise the switch sections after you spray the gunk on
them, you have to get them lined back up again so that you will be able to
get the shaft back in.  Did I mention the part about the individual
sections having no detents?

So you want to actually scrub the contacts with a swab or something?
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAAAAA!   Good luck.  I wasn't going to mess with
that.

It was well worth it.  Now I don't have to play with the band switch to get
the radio to come alive, and it will switch back to the same CW station
after flipping to another band.

RF