Recently, I was contacted about restoring a Predicta Debutante with nearly identical chassis. That inspired me to pull this chassis back out and finally attempt to get it running.
Here they are side-by-side. The Princess chassis is on tap and has a few caps replaced from when I started on it years ago.
Now back when I started messing round with it I did replace the electrolytics and a few paper caps and tried powering it up. I only got a few flashes of light on the CRT and no sound.
I used an 8YP4 with adapter and moved the filament lead from the low voltage tap to 6.3 volts.
This gassy tube might explain why I got no reception and a flaky HOT might explain the intermittent high voltage.
I dug right into it using the Deb. as reference. First out came the main board for a full recap including the couplates.
I made those up on little perf boards that were dipped in urethane conformal coating and painted with primer
Here's a look at the IF board.
Looking good inside the HV cage.
Cleaning out the CRT head.
It tests good but if I ever need a replacement I scored one from VDC back when they actually had CRTs in stock. Only $65 as I recall.
Ready for a power up test ! Note I replaced the electrloytics I has installed before with higher quality ones and used beefier IN5408 diodes.
