what I've been up to: Stewart Warner Mirror in Lid

[Electronic M]

Probably over 5 years ago I bought a Stewart Warner Mirror in Lid set from Wiscojim. The set had the wrong knobs no front service control cover plate (but materials to reproduce it), chunk out of the back corner of the foot so bad I had to slip an 8-track cart under it to prevent it from falling over when stuff was stacked on top of it, and the 10FP4 had an open heater.

Since I was missing some stuff I shelved the project and waited for what I needed to become available. Back in early fall I bought a fairly complete set is similar condition from Tony P and that got the ball rolling.... admittedly I have other projects I rather do first, but space is severely limited to the point that I need to get rid of duplicate consoles/large sets as a priority. So I've been making one perfect set to keep and one fixer upper to sell.
I ended up refinishing the cabinet from Jim's set since there were fewer gouges in the wood and less veneer missing, took the main cabinet and combined it with the base/feet from the set that came from Tony...I also refinished and tried to use the lid from Tony's old set since the veneer pattern was nicer but it didn't fit the same as the one that matches the cabinet.
I ended up refinishing both lids. The second one is almost done I just need a warm day to give it a final coat of lacquer.

I was trying to achieve a near mirror finish but I believe it was cleaned with silicone oil based polish or something similar. The bare wood had sections the top coat refused to stick to until a coat of shellac was applied to stop the issue... figuring that out wasted a LOT of lacquer and most days warm enough to spray... between that and the lacquer smooshing out from under the clamp I used when gluing back in the top rear crossmember/hinge mounting, I'm going to have to revisit the sides when it warms up outside....color is consistent but surface issues need to be sorted.

Chassis resto wasn't too bad. Caps are packed pretty tight in this set so better than half the job felt like brain surgery and another quarter of the caps had to be done in a sequence to minimize hastle of replacement. The set uses 2 pairs of 200uF IIRC 150V lytics in parallel to make 2 400uF caps which I replaced with a pair of 470uF caps I had saved from an old computer PS (never thought I'd use them in a tube TV!). After recap and changing the seleniums I went to power it. This set is a series heater set, but there was a transformer version too. On the ETF Sam's covers the series set and riders covers the transformer set. On power up the only the IF heaters lit and much too bright...I gradually realized most of the parallel heater tubes had been swapped for their 6V versions, and some were totally wrong...the worst of which was the ballast had a 6SN7 in it's socket...the heater was somehow bridging the IF heater pins of the ballast. I think this may be what killed the CRT heater. stealing every tube from the other chassis I finally got it to run on the variac... the separate RF based HV system warmmed up first which gave me some screen burn worry till sweep gradually started up. The tuner seems to be the same slug tuned design as a Raytheon porthole I own, and someone messed up all the fine tuning screw adjustments so I dialed in the ones I needed and ball parked the rest.

I still need to figure out how to change the mirror as the rear silvering is kinda lousy.

There are some interesting differences between the two sets. There were probably a number of production changes in this models life. The two sets have different lid size/mounting holes and hardware (also early one has black metal lip holding mirror later one is maroon red), the base screw locations are different and the base dimensions are slightly different (I was able to transplant the base sufficiently well), the veneer is different thickness between the two, and Tony's (IMO later production set) has the mount bolt heads for the CRT hidden instead of protruding through the face next to the CRT mask. Part of me wishes I knew which tuning knob Jim's set originally had since I have seen an earlier looking set of knobs on one of these sets that was on eBay years ago...

The chassis also have 2 notable differences (I haven't pulled the newer one ) the later set has a coil can mounted below the back of the chassis (which is the bottom on a mirror in Lid set) in such a way that removing the speaker is tricky. The plug in selenium Rectifier module is on the main chassis on the later set but on a separate sub chassis with extension cable (mounted to the side of the cabinet) on the early set. The early set has provisions for the selenium to mount to chassis the same as the later one.

Once I finish the keeper I plan to assemble the unused parts into a restorable set for some one else to tackle.

Here are a couple of pictures.