Wireless Set No. 52 Canadian - Project

[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

[Bob Carriere]

......... and I can hardly find the parasitic drop in my CMP....... what patience you have........

Looking forward to your next chapter...... Sherlock and the elusive volts!!!!!

Bob C.