1952 Zenith Bugeye AM/FM Clock Radio

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by vortalexfan

OK so I finally finished recapping the radio and went to plug it in and something made a sizzling noise in the radio and it started smoking so I quickly turned it off and unplugged it and took it apart to see what happened and nothing looked burned inside the radio, all of the filter caps were fine (they none of them were reversed) the 1N4007 Diode still looked good and it wasn't reversed and like I said nothing else looked burnt inside the radio, component wise.

The clock and the neon pilot light still work but the tubes aren't glowing so I don't know if maybe a tube failed or what, but either way its kind of got me stumped because nothing inside the radio looks burnt and none of the stuff that I thought of that could of caused that issue was the cause.

Any ideas as to what could of happened?

See photo below for the finished recap job.

You'll have to do some circuit tracing. I never reassemble a set until I'm satisfied it's working properly.
I have almost the same radio that I have to get back to.

[vortalexfan]

Originally Posted by dieseljeep

You'll have to do some circuit tracing. I never reassemble a set until I'm satisfied it's working properly.
I have almost the same radio that I have to get back to.

The only problem is that with the way this radio is built I have to put it back together in order to test it because it uses a funky 4-pin safety interlock plug on the back of the radio for the power cord, and a normal two pin safety interlock plug won't work on this radio, so that's why I had to put it back together to test it which was how it got smoked, because something in the radio wasn't hooked up right or something and it blew out some magical smoke, that was pretty rank smelling, it smelled like burnt rubber almost.
So it's kind of hard to test the radio chassis outside the case.