Wireless Set No. 52 Canadian - Project

[David Dunlop]

In addition to the 11 decals I need to replicate for the front panel restoration of my Supply Unit, I need to replicate two more decals for the front panel of the Coils, Aerial Tuning No. 2A. That sounds and looks like a lot of decals but one can pack a lot of them onto one 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, so I figured I might as well get the work done for all of them at once.

A bit of a trickier challenge for the decals on the front panel of the Coils Assembly. There is a photograph of them on Page 76 of the Operators Manual, but it is an angle shot taken from the upper front left of the Coils Assembly. This makes working with any dimensions off this photo, to establish the factory original measurements of the decals, pretty much impossible, or at the very least, very much beyond my humble means. The first photo in this Post is of this Page 76 image from the 52-Set Manual.

With this project, I have been fortunate enough to have a complete Coils Assembly as part of my Main 52-Set. For whatever reason, when this item was rebuilt in the 1960’s and the new remakes of its two decals applied, the front panel was never revarnished to protect them. Photo 2 attached. The lettering and borders on them are still bright white and the overall paint on the Coils Assembly front panel, bright Gloss Navy Grey.

I also have the remains of a parts Coils Assembly, bearing the same postwar remake decals, but the front panel of it was revarnished. The colouration of the varnish is very evident on both the top of the Gloss Navy Grey panel and the white areas of the two decals, as shown in the third photo. I have not yet had a really close examination of these two pairs of decals, but something about them so far gives me the initial impression they are not traditional water slide transfer decals but probably more modern ‘peel and stick’ type. In any event, I would like to get more factory original looking replacements on my Main Set Coils Assembly.

Earlier this morning, something prompted me to take a look at the front panel of the Sender again. The decals on it are all factory originals in very good shape, once they were carefully cleaned up a few years back. I was thrilled to rediscover a pair of LOCK decals still sitting right under my nose. The LOCK decal originally on the front panel of the Coils, Tuning Assembly from the factory, would have been a match to these two. A very nice rediscovery as I can now calliper the width and height measurements from the Sender LOCK decal for the one on the Coils Assembly. A little bit trickier for the AERIAL TUNING decal. The first half of this decal exists on the Sender; ‘AERIAL’ decal and the other half, ‘TUNING’ covers the same amount of space in characters, so it as well can now be replicated.

The final really interesting thing for me to find with this mornings examination of the Sender decals also relates to these odd, black and white bordered postwar remade Coils Assembly decals.

I can understand from a cost saving perspective the Canadian Army in the 1960’s would spend less money getting simple black, peel and stick decals with plain white lettering, rather than the more expensive production of luminous paint decals, but why the white borders? They simply do not exist anywhere else on the entire 52-Set. Then my eye caught the decals on the Sender. This will show in Photo 4 today but you might have to enlarge the images to see what I mean.

With a water slide transfer decal, it is common for there it be a thin trim strip of clear backing surrounding the entire decal. This is small enough to be of little concern because as soon as the decal is mounted this thin trim strip essentially disappears into the background colour of whatever the decal was just mounted onto. However, with these military decals, once all of them are mounted, a thin coat of varnish was applied to the decals to protect their painted surfaces from getting rubbed, or scratched away. So after a fresh application of decals has been completed, one sees nice crisp colours with clean white characters resulting from the dormant luminous paint sitting there. Then this top coat of varnish starts to yellow and eventually turns the crisp white characters yellow. Now take a look at Photo 4. It seems this yellowing process also shows up on the clear trim tabs surrounding the water slide transfer decals. You can see these yellow borders surrounding every decal in this photograph.

So what I suspect has happened back in the 1960’s is that some company was awarded a contract to replicate the original Coils, Aerial Tuning decals and was given access to an original front panel to establish/confirm the required specifications for the contract. When examining the original two decals, they would have noticed the original white characters had all turned yellow from the aging of the varnish. They probably also saw the same yellowing phenomenon on the trim strip bordering each decal and simply assumed a thin white border strip was present on these two decals and reproduced their interpretation accordingly. I will see what measurements I get from putting the callipers on the original LOCK decal on the Sender when compared to the 1960 remake specifications.


David

[David Dunlop]

My Gosh, I have not pulled out my Drafting Set for decades and had to think a bit regarding where I had tucked it away, but it holds a selection of tools that will prove most helpful for measuring up the Sender decals I now need to copy.


David

[David Dunlop]

Good progress so far this week.

The first great bit of news was that the spreadsheet image on my iMac screen was true dimension and that the default Row Height was 0.250 inches. The 11 Supply Unit decals turned out to be 0.250, or 0.500 inches in height. The printout sizing also turned out to match the screen image. Bonus!

From there, it was simply a lot of careful calliper measuring, and trial and error changing the Point Size of the cell dimensions in the spreadsheet to duplicate the remaining odd sized decal dimensions.

I now have a working sheet of the basic, black decal blocks for the Supply Unit decals and just need to experiment with finding an appropriate style and size of Font to add to these blocks. Because of duplicate block sizes among the 11 decals, only 7 basic blocks will be required, hence only the seven columns set up. The two decals for the Coils, Aerial Tuning will go on a separate Sheet later.


David

[David Dunlop]

It took a bit of fine tuning between, font and cell sizes over the last two days but the master for the set of Supply Unit decals is finally done.

In the process, another new observation was made regarding the factory original decals still on my Sender. There are three different sized fonts used for the Sender decals. In general terms these relate to the steps in the tuning process. The largest font is at the first tuning stage for the Sender, basically band selection. This determines which tuning coils will be used, the second stage with the next size down font. The last set of decals are the smallest font, basically equivalent to the ones used on the Supply Unit, Receiver and Coils, Aerial Tuning No. 2A, essential the standard controls identification font found on the bulk of the 52-Set and very similar to the font found on the 19-Set.


David

[David Dunlop]

Trying to fine tune the two different sized decals on just one sheet from the database proved a bit too challenging, so I split the two sizes out to two separate sheets. That made getting the background blocks to match the original size specs so much easier, and once that was done, I used a simple light table to overlay my decal sheets on to of the true size photo I had of the Supply Unit front panel from the manual and brought the font size from the computer down in size to match the size from the original illustrators work.

The black surround is now much more like the originals and gives be a bit more comfortable wiggle room for when the time comes to sort out the luminous paint blocks on the front panel.


David

[David Dunlop]

Once I had the Supply Unit Decals sorted out, I set up a third sheet on the database to work on the two decals for the front panel of the Coils, Aerial Tuning No. 2A. This went rather smoothly now that the bugs in the process had all been dealt with during the Supply Unit work.


So both pieces for my 52-Set will eventually get more correct looking decals on their panels.


David

[David Dunlop]

Actual, physical work on the 52-Set has been limited recently. I have spent most of my 52-Set time planning what needs to be done when I start work on the Supply Unit, making sure I have all the tools I need on hand before I start.

I am normally quite comfortable with disassembling a piece of wireless equipment on the bench and hunting down faults for repair, but I have come to realize with this 52-set Project that a huge portion of that comfort comes from knowing in the back of my mind that replacement parts for what I am working on are relatively common and easy to find. That concept held very true right up to working on the restoration of the two Receivers for the 52-set. With patience, original parts for the Receiver are easy to track down. the receivers are common. My level of concern shot up dramatically when I was working on the Sender, which also carried over to the Supply Unit. The Vibrator Supply Section of the Supply Unit that feeds the receiver is pretty basic electronics and quite similar to the remote Supply in design. The Sender Supply section, with its two big Robbins & Myers Rotary Transformers, drives the whole concern level back up to new heights. I am fortunate that testing to date indicated both sections of the Supply Unit are in pretty good working order and current indications suggest some careful inspection and cleaning of the Sender Supply Section will be enough to keep it happy for another 80 years, The Vibrator Supply for the receiver has a faulty component bleeding off 1.7 Volts DC somewhere, with a resulting proportional drop in the HT1 and HT2 Outputs for the Sender, so should not be too difficult to isolate and repair. The rest will just be physical repairs and replacements, but the shorter I can make the bench time, the happier I will be.

I recently obtained a new grease gun and mechanics stethoscope. I tossed my old grease gun some years after I stepped away from MV restorations. It was last loaded with Sodium grease that had badly broken down to a leaky oil and tossing was easier than cleaning at the time, as I had no real use for it.

The stethoscope was an odd purchase case years ago, but proved itself several times in finding the locations of sticky valves, tappets and blown cylinder head gaskets. I have no idea what happened to my original, but it likely got lost in one of several moves in my life. I have another high tech tool on order and currently in transit and have my eye on one more to get, when the price is right. With them all in hand, and with a couple of cartridges of grease yet to purchase, I should be good to go with restoring the 52-Set Supply Unit finally.


David