[R-390] St.J radios...long long long msg

[Death to Spammers]

At 08:52 AM 8/8/02 -0500, you wrote:

>I wouldn't buy an R-390A from Fair Radio or anybody else unless I was
>certain it did not come from the government auction at St. Julian's Creek
>Annex, VA.

I have to agree with you. Nasty nasty. Sad, too.

>A couple of years ago when the SJC R-390A's were hot items,
>someone e-mailed me a very well written discussion about the things that
>were wrong with a typical SJC R-390A.  I thought he posted it on the
>reflector, but now I can't find it.  Here are a few of the things I remember
>from his discussion.  Stainless steel screws rusted (not surprising).  This,
>of course, could make repairs more difficult.  Yellow wrap capacitors coming
>unwrapped.  Well, that's not too tough.  Replace the capacitors.  Coil
>windings in the shielded transformers of the RF deck starting to come
>unwound.  I don't know how you would fix this.  His conclusion (not mine)
>was that this RF subchassis was unsuitable for use in an R-390A.

I did some searching and found some of them. I seem to remember
more. There were several threads on the prospects of rebuilding
one without future problems.

(Begin Message 1)

Subject: Re: [R-390] New Owner
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Reply-To: Nolan Lee <nlee@gs.verio.net>

At 07:33 PM 11/1/98 -0800, you wrote:

 >So, if someone got an R-390 A in their Christmas
 >Stocking................ (I can dream, can't I?).  Let's say a St.
 >Julian's Creek victim.  What would be the best first thing to do
 >with/for it?

Rip it apart for parts. I've seen a couple of radios from there. Too
many "little things" damaged by the elements. You'd be looking at
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of work to bring them up
to the level of a radio that'd only cost you a couple of hundred
dollars more in the first place. I don't make a tremendous salary,
but my spare time is worth a hell of a lot more than $0.51 an hour.
They're good for parts. If I could find a couple of them local for
~$100.00 each, grab 'em for spares.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with pumping tons of hours
into a receiver. I just did one and am still working on a second one.
BUT, I started with two clean receivers. I can't see doing this with
something that'll always show the physical and emotional scars of
sitting in the rain and snow and sun for a couple of years when you
can start with a much nicer radio for a couple of hundred dollars
more.

Let's look at it from another perspective. It's kind of like deciding
that you want to build and drive a nice looking, good running 1958
Buick Limited because you worship chrome and they were cooler than
The King (Elvis).

Where's the first place that you'd look for one to restore? Well,
let's see, Otis, down at the local wrecking yard has one that you can
have for $125.00 dollars and $50.00 dollars freight, I mean a $50.00
wrecker bill to get it home. Best of all. you've got a couple of
hundred dollars in mad money that you picked up cutting pulp wood that
the old lady doesn't know about. ROAD TRIP! Load up the dogs in the
truck, take a bottle of Rebel Yell with you, and hit the road! HEEEHa!

After 14 miles of dirt roads, you're at Otis's place. "Out back of the
tire pile", slurs Otis. You wade thru saw briars and fight off swarms
of mosquitoes, shoot two copper heads, and suddenly, there it is!
An aura of fire dances around it as the chrome reflects the sunlight
into your bloodshot lust filled eyes while the 4 foot tall briars rustle
seductively in the wind and the cicadas make the sound of Summer time
love. Here Otis!, take the money bubba, I gotta have it! Tow it out to
my place and drop it next to Ma's old burn out trailer. No, the first
one....

Well, after you and the dogs and the car are home, Otis is gone, and
the Rebel Yell wears off, you eat a half a handful of BC's to kill the
headache and you ease over to it to evaluate your new "project".

It sat out there at Otis's place a few years after the courts released
it. They never did find the guys head or right foot, remember? Well,
after setting here soaking in the old UV rays, rain, dew, and snow, for
a few years, the stench of death and the blood stains are all gone.
The chain saw cuts in the upholstery are still there though. Gonna have
to fix that....

The chrome still shines, and now, it's all yours and you're now a full
fledged member in good standing of the Cult of the '58 Buick Limited!
Life is good bubba!

It's had a few dozen other's like it stacked on top at different
times, and the roof is mashed in about 6 inches and the doors won't
open, but hey, it's tough, it's a 58 Buick and it's cooler than The
King (Elvis)! Besides, look at all of that chrome....

Six months ago, Otis's brother in law was drunk and foolin' around on
the fork lift after his wife (the gal with the big hairdo) left him,
and he accidently rammed a tine thru the grill, taking out the radiator,
cooling fan, water pump pulley, water pump and the upper generator
bracket.

There's a few holes in the left fin where Otis Jr (product of Otis and
his 1st cousin Myra) sighted in his rifle one year. That boy never was
what you'd call "right". Most of the glass and various lenses are either
missing or broken. The numbers are peeling off of the odometer.

The battery froze a few years ago and ruptured, leaking electrolyte all
over the inner fender and radiator support and ate a hole big enough for
a possum to climb thru. All of the tires are flat, two wheels missing,
and the two that are there are wrong. Whoa! Look at all of  those
old snake skins on the engine. Cool!

The deck lid and the intake manifold and cylinder heads are missing
too. What the hell, 58 Buick Limited deck lids are common as dirt and
so are the high compression heads for the 300 hp version of the 364
cubic inch Buick engine. Oh, oh, the carb is gone too. ;-( Not a
problem, someone on the R_390_'58_Buicks_Cooler_Than_Elvis?
reflector might have some for sale.

Oh, I almost forgot. The back seat and carpet has been the home and
breeding place of 17 generations of watch dogs for the wrecking yard.
What the...is that?...no... why yes, yes, I  think that it really is,
it's dog fur carpet bubba! Damn, life sure is interesting at times!

No thanks! I'd rather pay a more money initially and buy one that's
been sitting in a barn for years, and has all of it's original innards
after the little old lady that drove it into to town once a month, went
insane from watching game shows and drinking fluoridated water, and
committed suicide and was eaten by little Fluffy and the other 41 cats.

Your mileage may vary. If you're ever in this neck of the woods, I can
fix you up with Otis's 1st cousin Mrya. Since she got that new glass
eye, the upper plate, and the make over, she looks pretty hot...

nolan

CAT, the other white meat!

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(Begin Message 2)

Subject: Re: [R-390] St. Julian's Creek radios
Reply-To: Nolan Lee <nlee@gs.verio.net>

At 06:42 PM 11/2/98 -0500, you wrote:

 >Nolan, you are fogetting about the character of these
 >radios.  These receivers have been all over the world
 >and served as soldiers for the good old USA, they deserve
 >some respect.

I'm immune to that aspect of it. They're machines, nothing more.
In the mid 1970's I worked for a division of Southern Scrap down
in New Orleans. I had a crew that averaged about 6 guys working
with me. One of my jobs was to see that all of the electronic gear
that was worth anything, stripped out of two USN WWII cruisers
(Topeka & Boston) just ahead of the crews with the torches. BTW,
my Collins R390A is off of the USS Topeka.) The big dollar items
like the guided missle systems, fire control systems, etc. had
priority. Most of the rest of the stuff was just considered as
obstacles impeding higher profits.

I've cut up, destroyed, burned, shredded, and smashed enough history
to last several lifetimes. I've taken sledge hammers and fire axes to
stuff to get it out of the way so that I could get to something that
needed to be removed when I didn't have a fire wrench (torch) handy
and I dind't feel like using handtools. Sometimes we just beat on
stuff for the hell of it. "Hey! Bet you a dollar that I can knock
that audio amplifier off of the bulkhead with only two licks".

On a side note though, I did haul truckloads of RTTY gear and other
stuff, in the form of TTY terminals, FSK converters, etc. out of
there that I gave away rather than see it run thru the shredder.
It cost me about 3 cents a pound to do this. :-) I still have a
few pieces of it. This was where I got the dozen or so R390A SSB
converters that I once had. Three cents a pound. :-)

 >I own several, and by the time you go all the way through
 >them, it's not that much more work.  They may not pass for
 >bright shinny new ones, but these things will still blow
 >the doors off of any rice-box/sand-box SWL receiver.

Sure they will. It's just I'd rather start with something that's
in better condition. The two St.J R390A's that I looked at had
set outside long enough for the digits to start falling off
of the counter and the color traces on the chassis harness to
fade away. I have to question the viability of the RF coils and
forms, the IF coils and forms, the PTO, the potentiometers, the
switches, the UV damage to the chassis wiring insulation, etc.
before I spend hours and hours of my time restoring it. What
will it be like, electrically, ten years from now? Twenty years?
I generally keep stuff a long time and look at it from long term
perspective.

They're well worth the ~$125.00 dollars that they sell for just
as a source of parts. Hell, the mechnical filters in the IF deck
alone are worth the purchase price.

 >It's neat to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear now and
 >then.

Some people would probably find the '58 Buick Limited that Otis sold,
an enjoyable challange. I wouldn't. ;-)

 >Sound's like Nolan may have ate a little too much
 >CAT meat.  Burrrp...  It's gotta be well done...

With pecan sause....   <grin>

 >In my opinion, the St. Julian's radios are worth more than
 >"a just driven on Sundays by an old lady" R-390A.
 >This is because of the history behind each one of them.
 >When they are gone, there ain't gonna to be no more.
 >These receivers are world class, if they could only tell
 >us where they have been and what they have been through.

I was originally in awe of the R390A receivers when I saw my first
one, but then something happened that really changed my outlook on
them. Another thing that the division of Southern Scrap that I
worked for did was dabble in the old GSA auctions. We bid on and won
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of R390A's back in the mid 1970's.
Back then, all of this stuff was stored in warehouses and not exposed
to the weather. They all had the meters back then too unless they'd
been robbed for parts. At the time, a good working R390A could bring
close to $700 at the retail level. This is when a new fullsize GMC
Cost me 3654.81. I put $700 down and financed the balance for three
years at $98.50 a month. R390A's were not a cheap item back then.
As a result, there was no enviromental damage and they looked pretty
damn decent. The nice ones that were complete went first. We shipped
most of those to Phil and George up at Fair Radio Sales. Some went
to other places, but truckloads went to FRS. At any rate, as the pile
of good complete ones got smaller and the pile of incomplete ones got
larger, I would strip modules out of some radios to be able to have
complete ones to ship. We also had a retail outlet and we'd keep it
supplied with clean working R390A's. After a while, a point was reached
where whe had dozens and dozens of hulks that weren't worth the trouble
to mess with. After I grabbed a few extra goodies for spares for the
R390A's that I had, they were shredded bubba.

I suppose that if I'd wanted to, I could have bought what was left for
.03 a pound rather than run it thru the shredder but I already had a
few good clean R390A's and enough spares to have lasted to today. :-)

Picking thru surplus R390A's 25 years ago was a lot different than
today. :-)

 >This is my two cents, whoever don't like it, <delete> please.

Cool! I did like it!

thanks,
nolan

"No question that an admission of making false statements to
government officials and interfering with the FBI is an
impeachable offense."
-- Bill Clinton, ARKANSAS GAZETTE, August 8, 1974, page 7-A.

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(Begin Message 3)

Subject: [R-390] St.J. receiver re-build
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Reply-To: Nolan Lee <nlee@gs.verio.net>

At 10:59 AM 12/6/98 -0000, you wrote:

 >I have had quite a job with the I.F. module. All of the 455 kHz I.F.
 >transformers needed work, I think the rain had effected the glue that holds
 >each end-cheek onto the coil former, with the result that the former would
 >rotate and break the wire off.

I just finished gutting an RF deck out of a St.J. receiver for parts.
I found a lot of deteriation in the variable IF's and the RF coils in
the RF deck due to exposure to the elements. In addition, a lot for
the tuning slugs were loose on their wires. It ended up that about 20%
of the plugin coils were out of spec and as a result, were scrapped.
All of the capacitors in them checked goo though. :-)

My comments on using the St.J. receivers as a restoration project have
been voiced here before and I won't go into it here. But, if you're going
to re-build a St.J. receiver, or any other receiver that's sat outside for
a while, there are a few extra steps that would probably be in your best
interest, for the long term, to do:

First, I'd remove all of the variable IF and RF coils from the RF deck.
Then, one at a time, remove the metal covers and do an inspection and
swab any film or loose debris out of them, especially around the
terminals, using a suitable solvent and without wetting the coils them-
selves. Some of the films (maybe oil washed down from the rain from
receivers stacked above it) can be conductive and give false values
when you do the resistance checks and probably would contribute to
signal loss.

Measure the resistance of the coils and compare your readings to the
manual. Then, using a good sensitive bridge or VTVM that'll do >500
megohm resistance or so, measure the resistance of the other pins to
each other and to the coil pins. If you get any reading here, you'll
need to either track down the problem or replace the coil assembly.
It doesn't take much of an oil residue on the phenolic to give a 10
meg resistance reading. You may find lower than normal readings on
some of the coil windings due to failure of the insulation. ;-(

I had one RF coil that had leakage that turned out to be the trimmer
capacitor. I disassembled the cap and cleaned it and reinstalled it
and the leakage was gone. Oh, while you're at it, I'd give each of
the trimmers a couple of three spins in alternating directions to
insure that the two little spring contacts are makling good contact.

Also inspect the coil forms and see if they are coming apart. They're
basically a flat spiral cut sheet rolled into a tube. I've seen them
starting to unwind on some of the coils of St.J. receivers. Redoping
the coils and the outside of the forms should prevent this and should
stop any that has already started from getting worse. I'd suspect that
this will help the receiver to hold alignment a lot longer.

For the coils that meet resistance specs, I'd either bake them in the
oven at a very low setting for a couple of hours or place them in a
very dry (humidity) area for a few days or so and then redope the
coils and outside of the forms.

Don't forget to check T207, T208, and the antenna trimmer can on the
RF deck. While you have the deck out, I replace the three paper
capacitors on the underside of the module and check the little nut
mount paper capacitor located near the 6DC6 tube.

Another thing that's probably worth doing would be to clean the
bandswitch to not only make sure that the contacts are clean but to
remove any possible oil film. Any type of conductive film here can cause
a flashover and a carbon track to the shaft and render that switch
section unusable. The fiberglass ones seem to be more prone to flashover.
These switches were more of a problem than a lot of people think,
evidenced by the number of RF decks with mixed (ceramic and fiberglass)
switch sections that I've seen. ;-(

I'd apply the same steps to the coils/switches/etc. on the crystal osc,
and IF modules.

nolan

"Man, I'd kill for a Nobel Peace prize."

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