Pulling Hair With Zenith Transoceanic 6T40!!!

[Tubejunke]

I really didn't want to post about not being able (thus far) to get a darned radio up to speed, but I seem to be going nowhere fast on this thing. It is a bit different than anything I have tackled before with it's little 1VDC and a 3VDC tube compliment utilizing directly heated filaments for cathode.

Essentially it is a dead set in all appearance, but that's because nearly all voltages are just low and so far I've missed the mark on why. For example the 3V4 audio output tube calls for 94V on the plate and I think I saw 53 or so. I've checked all of the Mohm resistors and found nothing way off. I swapped out the Selenium rectifier out of a spare I have and nothing changed. The two large wattage resistors right beside the rectifier are within specs. I found one leaky and way off value section of the electrolytic cap can; subbed that without paralleling across it, and I found two other paper caps leaky.

Of course out of all the paper caps two were bumblebees and a third .1mfd was some brown cased crap that may or may not have came new with the radio. The rest are those very hard and most often good white caps which I really don't suspect as causing any of my woes here. Perhaps the rectifier out of the other set that I subbed in was bad too. I found that they are quite different to check with a DVOM than a modern diode like a 1N4007. I should have used a VTVM while I had them both out! Duh!

Anyway, I can see that it is probably just ONE little thing that is keeping this nice old radio silent and I know that there are some that specialize in these, so it shouldn't be hard to come up with some ideas of problems common to these radios.

This is going to be a beautiful and nearly mint condition set when I do get it straight. My spare is the brown leather model that are much more expensive and hard to find, so I should be putting the hopefully working chassis in that, but frankly I like the black with gold trim much better. I think I will sell the leather case empty and keep the spare chassis.