It's too dang hot to do any soldering in my workshop so I'll do a little cabinet work. Although I did just use some Howard's products on it and it looks OK, I decided to go a step further, but not strip it.
Unlike the other VT71s I've worked on, this one doesn't have a control panel with metal tabs on the ends. Rather it's held on from behind.
Nice and gooey
It's still doing a decent job of supporting the CRT though so I'll leave it in place until I can get a reproduction from Renovated Radios.
I suppose I could unmount the CRT, but it's a pain to remount them. I'll just put some newspaper over the face to protect it.
First, I very lightly sanded down the old finish to get rid of the worst of the alligatoring. Then applied 5 layers of sanding sealer with more sanding between each layer. My goal is to fill in all the defects while preserving the color.
As for the control panel, I'll sand off what remains of the old decals and replace them. I have a nice set of repro. decals from Radiodaze, but the channel lineup isn't quite right.
On the left is a set I made a while back for a blonde set using an inkjet printer and special water slide decal paper. I figure I can carefully cutup the gold set to get the channels #s right.
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