[Tubejunke]

Well, since I was actually pulling in stations with little trouble I thought that I would yank the 6U5 "magic eye" which appeared to be dead. I've seen them all varieties of dim, but never completely dark.

The old thing is a little tough to pull, so I give it a good pull and the tube comes out and the socket falls apart in my hand. Nothing looks broken though. It wasn't hard to pull up a fair amount of material on the WWW concerning getting the thing wired back in correctly. This may be a good thing as the 1 Meg resistor I have read about revealed it's self and remains to be checked. At the same time it will help me in reconfiguring the socket. The two large pins are heater pins (1 & 6). The resistor jumps across pins 2 & 4 to B+. Pin 5 should be a wire that is a ground for the cathode and the only one left will be pin 3 for the grid. Not a problem.

The old Sylvania 140 proved that the tube was indeed dark as they come. So I got a short lesson in the fascinating world of the magic eye, which is deemed a cathode ray tube of sorts; a chance to check out the known problematic resistor, and weeded out another bad tube. I sort of hated tossing the old original script Zenith tube, but bad is just bad. On to yanking the chassis for a good cleaning a bit of wire replacement and likely power supply electrolytics. There is only minimal hum in the set and I can't tell yet if they run warm, but with what seems to be a delicate and slightly undersized power supply I don't want to take any chances. Later I may do the 1N4007 solid state rectifier job once I have worked other things out. Oh and there is a rubber or leather strap or band that controls the tuning. I have seen one online and it looks to me like an o ring with a hefty price. If that is all it is, I imagine I can size up something that will work for a few bucks.