A while back I did a minor restoration on a Sanyo quadraphonic receiver from about 1974. My sister originally bought this fresh out of high school, and it had been passed around the family, eventually winding up in my garage with a lot of dirt in the controls and about 2 1/2 channels working.
Anyhow I cleaned this up and wired it up to some various speakers that I had and I’ve been using this as my work shed stereo.
I’ve been pretty pleased with the sound and the reception. I had to clean the controls three times and recover a lightbulb floating around inside the chassis. It worked just fine when I placed it in the tuner window correctly, but I never had a proper strange type 1/4 watt 6vac lightbulb for the tuning meter.
I had a bunch of LEDs and a handful of various resistors laying around, and I experimented with different configurations to light my meter. In the end I didn’t like putting LEDs in a vintage receiver.
I ended up using two 3v Christmas tree lights in series. I peeled these two babies out of their plastic sockets and wired them up bare.
The tuning light was originally white, filtered thru a pale green meter, but now it’s much different green.
It looks good to me and it doesn’t appear to be overheating. It’s really no brighter than the original bulb.
Anyhow, because I had never fixed that lamp, I had never replaced the wood case, and it has been sitting open for months on end. I finally closed it up and got the case cover off my workbench which is very welcome.
This is one of those little projects, that while it remained incomplete, created sort of a mental bottleneck for the rest of the work that I’ve been trying to do. Anyhow I’m glad it’s off my list, and I’m really happy with the way the meter looks.
Anyhow I cleaned this up and wired it up to some various speakers that I had and I’ve been using this as my work shed stereo.
I’ve been pretty pleased with the sound and the reception. I had to clean the controls three times and recover a lightbulb floating around inside the chassis. It worked just fine when I placed it in the tuner window correctly, but I never had a proper strange type 1/4 watt 6vac lightbulb for the tuning meter.
I had a bunch of LEDs and a handful of various resistors laying around, and I experimented with different configurations to light my meter. In the end I didn’t like putting LEDs in a vintage receiver.
I ended up using two 3v Christmas tree lights in series. I peeled these two babies out of their plastic sockets and wired them up bare.
The tuning light was originally white, filtered thru a pale green meter, but now it’s much different green.
It looks good to me and it doesn’t appear to be overheating. It’s really no brighter than the original bulb.
Anyhow, because I had never fixed that lamp, I had never replaced the wood case, and it has been sitting open for months on end. I finally closed it up and got the case cover off my workbench which is very welcome.
This is one of those little projects, that while it remained incomplete, created sort of a mental bottleneck for the rest of the work that I’ve been trying to do. Anyhow I’m glad it’s off my list, and I’m really happy with the way the meter looks.
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