Lazy Sunday
Had a customer come by early this morning to pick up his 222 mechanism, keyboard, selection receiver, and amplifier. At least early for me on a Sunday. It took me about 3 weeks to get that all done. One cool thing about having essentially the guts out of a 222-I connected it all on the bench, connected a couple small speakers and was able to completely test everything and make sure the mech was sorted out. I have a bunch of SPU1-H credit units and since that was used on the 222 I went through them all and tested them along with all the equipment. This worked out well. The mech had one mis-adjusted mute switch and that was it.
I knew the amp was good. It had already been bench-tested alone so it was an easy matter to look immediately at the two muting switches and see that I has missed gapping one of them correctly. I like being able to test everything in one go. Often times the mech will have some kind of problem since I hadn’t been able to fully run it and the customer gets stuck with having to figure it out with me offering advice. Tracy wanted to bring his other 222 mech along too but I need the bench space to dive back into the ( choose your expletive ) 6000 album player.
Everything was rocking along with the 6000 pretty well until… The main drive gear in the scan motor had a broken tooth but ran smoothly when I put one of Luke’s Jukes small gears in. I think another tooth or two broke. The mech will scan left to right but not the other way unless I give it a helping hand. Just before it stopped moving to the left the mech would scan with a skip. That was probably the second broken tooth.
The radio/amp played well on the amp testing bench but I had all kinds of problems when transferred and connected to the mechanism. I even had to wonder if it was an errant ground. Amp bench is wooden topped and did not have a weak channel. The mech bench is metal topped. Now either the right channel is weak or non-existant or no sound. One thing about having to chase down problems is getting side-tracked by ideas like a ground issue. It has to be checked. I’m grateful that the ESP selects correctly. It didn’t until a lot of research and a lucky ebay find for an obsolete SCR fixed it. So, the radio/amp is now on the kitchen table being poked and prodded. It is hinged and when I open it there are many wires from one half to the other. When it was playing I could wiggle the bundle and lose audio. Unfortunately they are single strand wires lacking the flexibility truly needed for opening and closing. I get the feeling I may have to change them all out with multi strand wire to ensure I don’t have a on again off again break in the middle of one of the wires. Oh the rabbit holes one runs down in jukin’.
My Seeburg Life 