If it was slow we did some 9-160 repairs. NEVER with a shorted HOT.
As with you I learned a few painful lessons so we just swapped them out.
Lots of PC cons, filters & 32 V source transistors. We kept abt
6 of both flavors in the truck & shop.
Never liked 9-181 sets, to awkward to work on. And the start circuit
was dumb ass. Funny thing is a lot of them ran 20+ years without
a repair.
One thing Zenith must be given credit for from the 9-160 era.
The spark gaps. I never had a Zenith destroyed by lightning but
saw tons of those spark gaps toasted. The sets survived usually
with a blown fuse at worse. Often the customer never knew, I
noticed it when repairing something else later on.
Thanks for the memories
73 Zeno
