The Fine Things are Always Hand Made

How do you support a Scott chassis when you work on it?

Hello everyone!

This is the first Scott chassis I have worked on. It's a Scott AM/FM Philharmonic. I've replaced the capacitors in the power chassis and now I want to work on the tuner chassis. I weighed this and it's close to 60 pounds.

My question to all of you is how do you support the chassis when you work on it? I asked Scott Seickel how he did it and he showed me pictures of his metal chassis stand. It's beautiful and does everything he needs. I don't have the ability to make one of these, and I'm thinking about using 2 4x4 blocks and lots of towels to hold it in place while I work on it.

I'd love to know what you use to hold these big beasts inverted while you work on them. If you don't have a stand like Scott does, what do you use to keep it in place and stable while making sure you don't scratch or damage the chrome?

Thanks in advance!

Chris

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Permalink Reply by Scott Seickel on November 22, 2018 at 10:24am

Hi Chris.

This is a Zenith 8 tuber I put on the bench yesterday. I made this support in about 15 minutes last night. While it is not nearly the size of a Philharmonic, I have done similar with chassis that make a Philharmonic look small and light (an Andrea T-VK12 television for example).

The Philharmonic doesn't have 4 of the the robust mounting holes like most sets. The rear has 1/4-20 mounting holes, but for the front you need to use the #6-32 holes that the bottom cover mounts on. They will be fine to hold the chassis, but I would put a nut on the inside as a precaution, and use fender washers where the head of the bolt hits the wood.

I prefer my set to be on a 45 degree angle for easy access. I find that if it is parallel to worktop that it is difficult at best to reach the rear especially on a deep chassis.

This simple wood mount is stable in all the pictures shown below. No reason why the same couldn't be done for a Philharmonic. I used 3/4" plywood for the sides and 3/4" stock for the L part. I glued and screwed the 3/4" pieces to the sides. The 3/4" will be plenty strong for a Philharmonic.

Personally, I would never try to work on a Philharmonic without some solid support.

The amount of time/effort to make a support such as below will be more than made up for by convenience of working on the chassis combined with reducing the risk of damage to delicate coil covers.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Wysong on November 22, 2018 at 4:02pm

Scott, thank you for showing me the stand. It makes perfect sense and it's a solid piece.

I was searching for "chassis stand" on the forum and found one from a few years ago that you had started. On page 2 of the post I saw a reference to the Steve Strong large chassis stand. It turns out I know this poster and his name is Rodney. I have one of these large stands but wasn't sure it would support the chassis. I contacted Rodney and he let me know that he did repair a Masterpiece VI chassis using the stand, and it did just fine. That's what I'll be going with. I drilled 2 more chassis bolt holes in the bottom so that I could have 4 solid bolts going through it, and I've lined up my bolts and washers. I'm concerned about the threads going through the holes as they may have 2 turns max, so I'll also install nuts to ensure the bolts hold properly. And just because I'm really paranoid about the chassis I'll put some blocks and soft rags under the tuning cap section just to make sure nothing goes wrong. Now I just need to wait to get the caps to start on it.

Thanks again,

Chris