The volume control pot (a dual unit, one potentiometer attached to the back of the other) in my Zenith MJ1035 is extremely loose on the chassis, making it nearly impossible to attach the knobs to the shaft without pushing the entire control back into the chassis. The control is mounted under the chassis, so I cannot hold it in place (with the chassis in the cabinet) while installing the knobs. How is or was the dual volume pot originally attached to the chassis? Is there any way, short of super-gluing the pot to the chassis (which I may end up doing as a last resort), to mount the control?
Another problem: The volume control is very intermittent. When it does work, I can barely hear the radio (with the control at maximum). The wiring to the control looks as if it is a mess, with the left-channel volume pot actually broken (the carbon track is split roughly in half and has parted company with the rest of the control). The tone control, on which is mounted the push-pull on-off switch, is quite loose as well. I don't know how this happened, unless the damage occurred during shipping (I got this radio from an AK member in Arizona; I live in Ohio, so the set was in transit over some 2,000 miles). The radio was shipped to me via UPS, which leads me to believe the box in which it was packed may have been kicked across a floor, thrown around, or otherwise manhandled before it was put on the truck. The person from whom I got the radio (AK member Nolan Woodbury) tells me the unit was working in stereo before he shipped it; moreover, the set was extremely well packed for shipping (took me the better part of an hour to unpack it when it arrived here).
The radio still basically works, bringing in all Cleveland FM and AM stations very well (in stereo; at least the red stereo indicator lights when the radio is tuned to a station broadcasting in that mode, although I have yet to hear anything from the left-channel extension speaker), except for the low volume problem. I am amazed that the set didn't have a bunch of broken tubes, etc. if it were manhandled as severely as I think it was.
Speaking of broken tubes, I was working on my MJ1035 last night and had to replace one of the tubes when, to my amazement, a pin broke off the tube in question. No kidding; when I removed the tube from the socket, I found a piece of metal in one socket hole. Looked at the tube I had just removed and found a vacant spot where the pin once was. The "piece of metal" I found in the socket was that pin.
I'll be darned. This is the first time in over 40 years of electronics experimenting that I have ever seen a pin actually break off a miniature vacuum tube. I've seen it happen on occasion with
octal Bakelite-base tubes, but never, before now, with a miniature glass tube. (I'm actually amazed as well the tube was still under vacuum when the pin came off; at least I think it was, as there was no evidence of air in the glass envelope). Oh well...
How on earth the controls (volume and tone) could have worked loose (the tone control was loose when I got the radio), let alone how the left-channel volume control broke up as it did, is a mystery to me unless, as I mentioned, the radio's shipping box was subjected to gross manhandling before it was ever loaded onto the truck.
It's things like this that will make me think at least twice before I will ever use UPS for shipment of an important and/or fragile package. I read every once in a while in AK's forums of radios, TVs and such that were shipped via UPS only to arrive at their destinations smashed or mutilated, but this is the first time I personally have ever experienced such a thing myself, if in fact the loose tone control/balance-volume controls were the result of rough handling of the package in transit.
What's this world coming to?
