Zenith A1512J restoration

[bandersen]

A friend has four or five of these "bug eye" sets and has been very anxious for me to restore them. So much so, he went ahead and pulled the chassis and dropped them off at my doorstep. That's why you'll only see a chassis in the next few pictures. I don't have the CRT or speaker either, but I think I can rig something up.

A couple days ago I decided to tackle one while I wait some parts for my Tandem set. It has a 15A25 chassis and I dug up a schematic in a Beitmans from 1958. Looks like a typical series strung set with a voltage double for B+.


They used little solder "cups" rather than terminal strips. That's a first for me, but I quickly got the hang of them and replaced the dozen or so paper caps.


I pulled the selenium rectifiers out and mounted a terminal strip for new diodes and electrolytics.


There are seven controls mounted facing up which were all very hard to turn. Likely a results of dirt, grim and moisture working there way in. The contrast was so bad I had to resort to a little surgery to free it up.


Time for a power up The proper CRT is a 14XP4 with a 450mA filament. I'm temporarily using a 600mA test 8XP4.