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  #76  
Old 12-06-2014, 10:13 PM
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davet753 davet753 is offline
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A vacuum leak, if bad enough, will certainly make it run rough. It can also have unwanted effects on the climate control operation. For instance, when the thermal blower lockout switch started leaking on mine, I knew about it because whenever I stepped on the accelerator with the A/C on, the air warmed up because of insufficient vacuum to keep the blend door actuator pulled shut.

I have always heard that in addition to causing rough idle, that vacuum leaks will cause a slight reduction in fuel economy.

On your Lincoln, the slight vacuum hiss when the headlight switch is pulled or climate control lever operating is normal, and nothing to be concerned about. On your parking brake, there is a vacuum actuator that pulls in when the car is put in drive. If this is leaking, you will hear a constant hissing whenever the car is in drive. Vacuum to this actuator is through a switch on the bottom of the steering column. To check these, just get under the dash near the bottom of the steering column and have a helper to shift through all the gears. There should ne no constant hissing at any time near the switch assembly. If it's leaking, the "quick and dirty" fix is to remove the two vacuum hoses and plug them with golf tees.
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  #77  
Old 12-29-2014, 01:54 AM
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Electronic M Electronic M is offline
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Well I finally fixed the high beam dimmer!



The symptoms told me the relay was not closing so it had to be the foot switch, the relay or the two interconnect wires. I started at the foot switch since that was the easiest thing to locate. The switch was good so it became a game of find the relay....They were nice enough to dip the wires to the relay down below a piece of sheet metal which threw me off for a bit, but at least the relay was close by and easy to get at. The wiring was fine, but the relay was not....



The coil was open on the relay. Well I hit up the local Autozone and they did not have it or any part number for it, or even the motivation to try to find a 20A DPST relay that I could kludge in. Next I checked Radio Snack but they were out of automotive grade relays...After not finding anything on the net, or any 12V relays in my parts stash I came up with two options...Fix the open coil or kludge in a 6V DP-tripple throw relay (with the contacts in parallel to match the current rating) with a resistor in series with the coil to drop half the input voltage. The repair seems to have worked.




The open was in the lead in wire to the coil (corrosion), but was near the center of the winding which forced me to drill out the rivet for the center terminal which also happens to be the core for the coil...After I got the core out unwinding the coil took me about an hour. Rewinding it proved to be quick though. I chucked the core into a drill plugged into a variac to reduce the speed to a safe and manageable one. A bunch of soldering (including replacing the crimp end of the rivet with solder) later and I obtained a working product.
One of the connectors to the relay is a bit finicky, but once in the right place seems okay.
I love that it cost me no money, but it cost enough time that I sort of wish I'd have been able to buy a replacement...I had been planing to swap in a stereo 8-track (until I can get a good quad 8-track) today (well technically yesterday now that it's 2:00AM ) but will have to get to that later.

Hope I didn't bore ya too badly.
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Last edited by Electronic M; 12-29-2014 at 02:00 AM.
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  #78  
Old 12-29-2014, 03:11 AM
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Jon A. Jon A. is offline
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Clever for sure, but you're right, it would have been better to pay for a new part than invest all that time in fixing that one.

I can relate; I was given a new-in-box power supply for my PC build, but the trouble it caused me was not worth the savings. The system was shutting itself off randomly and often, and I checked everything *but* the power supply just because it was new. That off-brand has a very poor reputation and mine was no exception. I finally swapped in the Thermaltake unit that I was saving for a quad-core build.
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  #79  
Old 12-29-2014, 12:34 PM
dieseljeep dieseljeep is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Electronic M View Post
Well I finally fixed the high beam dimmer!



The symptoms told me the relay was not closing so it had to be the foot switch, the relay or the two interconnect wires. I started at the foot switch since that was the easiest thing to locate. The switch was good so it became a game of find the relay....They were nice enough to dip the wires to the relay down below a piece of sheet metal which threw me off for a bit, but at least the relay was close by and easy to get at. The wiring was fine, but the relay was not....



The coil was open on the relay. Well I hit up the local Autozone and they did not have it or any part number for it, or even the motivation to try to find a 20A DPST relay that I could kludge in. Next I checked Radio Snack but they were out of automotive grade relays...After not finding anything on the net, or any 12V relays in my parts stash I came up with two options...Fix the open coil or kludge in a 6V DP-tripple throw relay (with the contacts in parallel to match the current rating) with a resistor in series with the coil to drop half the input voltage. The repair seems to have worked.




The open was in the lead in wire to the coil (corrosion), but was near the center of the winding which forced me to drill out the rivet for the center terminal which also happens to be the core for the coil...After I got the core out unwinding the coil took me about an hour. Rewinding it proved to be quick though. I chucked the core into a drill plugged into a variac to reduce the speed to a safe and manageable one. A bunch of soldering (including replacing the crimp end of the rivet with solder) later and I obtained a working product.
One of the connectors to the relay is a bit finicky, but once in the right place seems okay.
I love that it cost me no money, but it cost enough time that I sort of wish I'd have been able to buy a replacement...I had been planing to swap in a stereo 8-track (until I can get a good quad 8-track) today (well technically yesterday now that it's 2:00AM ) but will have to get to that later.

Hope I didn't bore ya too badly.
The relay is a Guide Lamp product, which is or was owned by GM.
They should have looked under Cadillac or Oldsmobile.
Anyway, it turned out fine, but very labor intensive.
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  #80  
Old 12-29-2014, 08:36 PM
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Electronic M Electronic M is offline
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Impersonating the voice of Doc Brown from back to the future: 'No wonder this part failed, it says made by GM'...
I had to start watching TV about 20 minutes into the coil work to avoid death by boredom...
It would seem the previous owner or the guy before him had discovered the bad relay since when I found it it was VERY loosely bolted in.

Well the 8-track radio I was going to install until I can get a working quad unit together must have felt sorry for the quad since it did nearly the same thing...It's FM band worked for just a bit during testing (just long enough to tease me) in preparation for installation then after checking the AM went dead. UGH! The two units now compliment each other in malfunctions. I'm getting fed up to the point that I might just hack in a 90's radio/cassette player and be done with it. I'm not too keen on being limited to just AM-FM let alone the drifty one in my Lincoln currently...That thing is so bad that I practically have to drive with one hand on the tuning knob sometimes....Were all 70's car radios finicky heaps or have I just been finding all the bad ones?
I wonder if Muntz sold any tube AM-FM/4-track tape car stereos?...Those I could at least properly trouble shoot and repair without a schematic.
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  #81  
Old 12-29-2014, 09:15 PM
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I say pick your battles - I messed with vintage car decks in my old 60s trucks, but in my current ride (1986 toyota diesel pickup) I put in a brand new alpine. It sounds fantastic and works perfectly... Yeah kind of an eyesore in the dash but I can't make every single aspect of life into a project. It was like $80 brand new and an hour to install.

That car is really nice and given the substantial cabin, smooth engine and lack of road noise if you outfitted it with a modern car stereo you could really make it rock... Car stereos from before the mid 80s just weren't "there yet" like the vintage home stereo gear was in my opinion.

Also if you have some power to spare you can get better speakers with a lower resonant frequency and synthetic cone material, for another upgrade over the cheap paper cone 6x9 s

Last edited by maxhifi; 12-29-2014 at 09:22 PM.
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  #82  
Old 12-29-2014, 10:12 PM
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I had a couple of dud Ford 8-track stereos way back when. They were poorly-installed retrofits. That was before the internet and eBay became popular so I didn't get my hands on another one for a very long time. Of the six I have now, only one is in poor working condition. I think it's stuck on FM no matter what band switch is pushed in.

Now I just need to stop sitting on my hands in regards to getting the kind of component deck I want.
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  #83  
Old 12-29-2014, 10:52 PM
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I happen to prefer the sound tube and early SS gear with no B class or below amplification to be found, and the FM and 8-track sections on the unit I was testing today sounded better then most newer car stereos I've heard with 70's Sony home speakers connected to it. My issue is that without a schematic trouble shooting goes from being a ~1 hour task to Russian Roulette (ie I'm just as likely to totally ruin it as fix it when working blind).

I'm glad most out there are still working good. If I was to plop down more than 20$ on a stereo I'd just buy another period unit with quad-8 track...Only in working condition or at least the same unit with different issues to let me compare voltages and find the problem.
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  #84  
Old 12-30-2014, 10:07 AM
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A late 70s car stereo will be either a discrete transistor amplifier biased as close as humanly possible to class B, or an early IC power op amp. It's not a miniaturized Harmon kardon citation, it has more in common with a transistor table radio. Of course it can sound good, and of course quad 8 track is really neat... I only said why I went modern because time is finite and driving two hours every day without a properly working radio is really boring! Given unlimited time, my car would have a nakamichi 350 or an early 80s pioneer setup
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  #85  
Old 12-30-2014, 10:36 AM
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A schematic should be easy to get, I have a Sams for both major revisions in my Ford stereo collection. I don't have any quad units though, never got into them.
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  #86  
Old 12-30-2014, 02:26 PM
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Just for fun decided to start using google on your behalf and came up with this

http://www.nostalgiaair.org/forums/M...1/M0108821.htm

This is from '70. Class B transformer coupled power amplifier - not exactly the stuff dreams are made of, but in yours it will likely have done away with the transformers and be a quasi complementary symmetry design, so at least won't be bandwidth limited by the transformers. Power output will be rather severely limited by the low B+ voltage though, this is after all before the days of BTL amplifiers, or switch mode supplies, and another limit will be the fact these old decks need 8 ohm speakers rather than 4 ohms.

What could cause dead radio here? I would start with cleaning the tape/radio switch really well, and in yours the AM/FM switch. Also, the 8 track player will definitely be wanting a new belt if it's going to work long term.. even if the existing belt still works, it will doubtless be stretched and not achieving the best possible wow and flutter performance, and nobody wants to be installing and removing head units unnecessarily if it fails in use.

If it's not switches, it will be failing coupling capacitors. I have had very little luck with low value electrolytic capacitors in audio equipment from before 1980 still meeting spec. You would probably want to go ahead and just change them all out. Not a bad job though, the new ones are so cheap all it takes is some bench time. Once you get the switches and controls cleaned, the capacitors replaced, and a new belt, then you have to go about adjusting the tape head so that it doesn't hear the wrong tracks. This seems to be the Achilles heel of the format, as soon as I get my home player adjusted for one tape, it seems all out of whack for another tape for adjacent track bleed through. Then touch up the azimuth for best high frequency response, and you're about home free.

Then hope that the splices in your tapes aren't dried out, because if they are, the tape will break at the splice and you will end up with a mess on your hands. I picked up a roll of 1/4" foil splicing tape at radio shack back when they still carried it, but probably now you'd need some kind of kludge to make it work, and every single tape will have to be done. They also will need new foam pressure pads (for the cartridges using foam pressure pads), else you will have all sorts of flutter related problems and drop outs unless the cartridge is inserted just so. And if the tapes use rubber pinch rollers as opposed to the later plastic style, then this may be another problem - if it's dried out then the tape can slip and again reduce performance.

Add to this that at this stage in the game, the lubrication which keeps the continuous loop moving along is likely getting old, and the tape can bind and, well, again reduce performance.

I think that the 8 track format can have half decent performance when everything is optimized and tuned and operating at 100%, but keeping it that way is a giant pain which crosses the line into "not worth it" for me, especially considering that 95% of the 8 tracks I come across are music I have no interest in.

Cassette on the other hand, while inherently limited by the slower speed, has the same track width as 8 track, and a much better situation in terms of maintainability and media availability. It's also nice that you can buy blank tapes any time you want, instead of trying to keep old ones together with spit and chewing gum, and suffering either constant failures, or a never ending maintenance nightmare as your collection expands.

I think the only situation in which I would want a functional 8 track player in my vehicle, would be a collector's car which originally came with one. For example, if I had the good fortune to own a '66 T-Bird, and it had the factory 8 track deck, I would move mountains to make sure it worked perfectly and I had the best 8 track collection going - as a retrofit though I don't really see it being worth the effort, especially since by the time your car was made, cassette was already starting to take over and 8 track was in terminal decline.

Last edited by maxhifi; 12-30-2014 at 02:30 PM.
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  #87  
Old 12-30-2014, 03:25 PM
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It depends on how much you like 8-tracks really. I got my first 8-track player in late '90 or early '91 and was instantly hooked.

My newest Ford 8-track stereo is a 1983 model. With the proper knobs that one would look right at home in the dash of a 1984 Mercury Lynx; the texture of the plastic of the stereo face matches that of the dash bezel. It would plug right into the factory harness too.
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  #88  
Old 12-30-2014, 04:23 PM
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It depends on how much you like 8-tracks really.
.
Now that is a very good point!
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  #89  
Old 12-30-2014, 08:04 PM
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Pure class B audio should theoretically never exist. It always has to be at least slightly into class AB in order to prevent highly noticeable/objectionable crossover distortion, and I can't imagine any properly working piece of audio gear that would be designed to be pure class B.

My radios are both newer designs having ICs in the output and tuner stages. The one in that link looks like an early 60's design that was modified to allow for a tape system to be added.

I tried the switch on the stereo unit, and I can't definitely locate it in the Quad unit.

I don't have a source of proven caps for transistor gear, and don't have an ESR meter to check what I have so a shotgun recap would likely just create new problems....Also the troubles are somewhat intermittent which makes signal tracing/injection trouble shooting a must.

I've maintained several home 8-track decks and a healthy collection of tapes for over a decade now so I know what that entails. I collect recording formats, and love messing with an unusual format or mechanism. Also I know many shortcuts such as ordinary clear scotch tape and or super glue to fix the foil splices (less than a 10 minute job for me.)

I listen to 30's-80's popular music almost exclusively so most of what I care about is represented, and I have a home deck so if I don't have or can't find what I want I can just dub a new tape. I also have cassette to 8-track adapters (some of which I view as poorly as you view 8-tracks) of varying quality. With one of those the machine becomes dual format, and if I add a one of those CD to cassette adapters (you know the 'cassettes' with the 1/8" stereo phone jack coming out of them) the number of formats I could attach becomes only limited by my desire to do so.

My big problem getting a correct schematic was that the model numbers were obliterated on my units, but I got a good idea since my last post....I looked up my machines on ebay (since they are both factory correct options for my car it was easy), and lifted pictures of the model #s, and from that found that they are in sam's AR-228, and AR-333...Now to find someone with those manuals that don't want 44$ for the pair like the sam's web site does.

BTW it was not until the model year after my car was made that Lincoln started offering cassettes in that model, and not until the early 80's that the quad 8-track units stopped being offered despite quad being essentially dead in the market place by the time my car was made.
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Last edited by Electronic M; 12-30-2014 at 08:10 PM.
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  #90  
Old 12-31-2014, 10:03 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Electronic M View Post
Pure class B audio should theoretically never exist. It always has to be at least slightly into class AB in order to prevent highly noticeable/objectionable crossover distortion, and I can't imagine any properly working piece of audio gear that would be designed to be pure class B.

My radios are both newer designs having ICs in the output and tuner stages. The one in that link looks like an early 60's design that was modified to allow for a tape system to be added.

I tried the switch on the stereo unit, and I can't definitely locate it in the Quad unit.

I don't have a source of proven caps for transistor gear, and don't have an ESR meter to check what I have so a shotgun recap would likely just create new problems....Also the troubles are somewhat intermittent which makes signal tracing/injection trouble shooting a must.

I've maintained several home 8-track decks and a healthy collection of tapes for over a decade now so I know what that entails. I collect recording formats, and love messing with an unusual format or mechanism. Also I know many shortcuts such as ordinary clear scotch tape and or super glue to fix the foil splices (less than a 10 minute job for me.)

I listen to 30's-80's popular music almost exclusively so most of what I care about is represented, and I have a home deck so if I don't have or can't find what I want I can just dub a new tape. I also have cassette to 8-track adapters (some of which I view as poorly as you view 8-tracks) of varying quality. With one of those the machine becomes dual format, and if I add a one of those CD to cassette adapters (you know the 'cassettes' with the 1/8" stereo phone jack coming out of them) the number of formats I could attach becomes only limited by my desire to do so.

My big problem getting a correct schematic was that the model numbers were obliterated on my units, but I got a good idea since my last post....I looked up my machines on ebay (since they are both factory correct options for my car it was easy), and lifted pictures of the model #s, and from that found that they are in sam's AR-228, and AR-333...Now to find someone with those manuals that don't want 44$ for the pair like the sam's web site does.

BTW it was not until the model year after my car was made that Lincoln started offering cassettes in that model, and not until the early 80's that the quad 8-track units stopped being offered despite quad being essentially dead in the market place by the time my car was made.
I have a friend who has a 72 Lincoln Mark IV with the factory 8 track, in his the radio doesn't work but the 8 track does, and he is always listening to the same couple tapes. His is maroon, with a maroon and white leather interior. It has a Cartier clock in the dash! I have offered to repair it for him if he can remove it, I can't imagine being stuck without a working radio. Then again he only drives it on nice days. I've been preparing a script in my head for the eventual conversation "if you ever want to sell your Lincoln, please keep me in mind!" Hes a car collector so things are always coming and going but I know he especially likes the Lincoln. It's been way too long since my driveway was graced with the presence of some Detroit iron!

Yes of course the transistors won't be biased into full cutoff, or like you said crossover distortion would be abysmal, but they're also not exactly biased into the most linear region of the transistor either, because if they were it would harm efficiency too much.
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