#triplett

Spent yesterday working on some minor projects.

I have a Knight tube tester that I got at an antique radio swap meet a few years ago. It was working fine, but since I’d never opened it up, I thought I’d do so and just see what it was like inside.

Turns out it was pretty clean. There were a few minor issues though. Someone had used electrical tape in a bunch of places to cover soldering iron burns on wires, or hold wires together, and the adhesive had started to degrade, leaving a sticky mess. I replaced the damaged wire and cleaned off the sticky goo as best I could.

There was also an old wax capacitor in there which I replaced with a modern equivalent. Lastly, there were (plastic?) sleeves holding some of the wire bundles in place, but they had started to degrade, and were kindof slimy.. 

So I cut those out of there and used zip ties to hold the wire bundles in place.

I also worked on my Triplett tube tester and my B&K tube tester, but forgot to take pictures of those. It’s too bad because the B&K was an interesting restoration. It had spent most of its life on the coast, and much of the wiring inside was fuzzy with mold. Spent an hour with a respirator, gloves, and rubbing alcohol getting the fuzz off the wires (which were intact underneath) and cleaning up the case. 

Next step for that one will be replacing the 4 old electrolytic caps inside. Those are on the way, so maybe I’ll take pics of that next week when I do the work.

trip is an invisible inhuman haven’t we all accepted this by now