Newbie with an 800B

[Day Radebaugh]

Hello:

I'm Day Radebaugh from El Dorado, Kansas, and was happy to find this site.  30 years ago, when I was a starving student, I lived in a house in Baltimore that was in the process of being sold.  They had an old Scott console (with a phonograph, as i recall) which i bought for $5.  I couldn't keep the cabinet, but kept all but the phonograph.  It's been stored inside ever since.

So now I'd like to have it restored, and I would build a new console to contain it.  Do you have any suggestions about how to proceed?  Anyone you know of who could tackle a functional restoration of this unit?

Thanks for your help.

Day Radebaugh

[Day Radebaugh]

Many thanks, Kent,  for the information.  This clarifies everything.  

Would you have any recommendations for a BC loop?  There seem to be a lot of them out there.

[Kent King]

Well, for a "vintage" solution, I'd try to locate a loop from a Laureate set. They turn up, there was one on ebay not too long ago (might still be out there). For a modern solution, I have several of these:

https://www.amazon.com/Tecsun-Rotatable-Tuneable-Antenna-Battery/dp...

Kent

[David C. Poland]

Laureate loop on eBay now.  Compare it to the 800B information 

eBay item number:

372200830592

[Day Radebaugh]

Thanks for the help, guys.  I found a little AM loop around the house that must have come with a Sony receiver I bought years back.  I've hooked up the SW and BC loops, but can't seem to tune either band in.  The magic eye lights up, but nothing is detected in either case.

Suggestions for troubleshooting?

[Day Radebaugh]

Update: Unhooked the SW loop, hooked up the BC loop independently, and can tune in some BC stations above 1000 KC.  The strongest of these will close the AM tuning eye, and sounds pretty good.  

This may well be an antenna/signal strength problem, due to the fact that there is not as much BC signal strength out here as I imagined.  I live in a rural area, on a farm, about 50 miles from Wichita, which is where I suppose most of the antennas are.

Any suggestions about the sort of antenna I can hook up for BC & SW that would provide the best chance of seeing a) if there are any stations and b) the receiver is working well.

I saw in the instructions that you could tune the loops with a signal generator, which I don't have.

Thanks

[Day Radebaugh]

800B seems to play fine, waiting for my cabinet to be built. 

In the meantime, hooked up my external TV yagi as FM source, instead of inside dipole.  Still runs fine, but not much better, to be honest.  However, also hooked up the antenna ground to a water pipe in basement.  As I was hooking up, and radio running, saw a little spark between ground on antenna terminal strip and ground wire.  Measured voltage between ground on antenna strip and house ground, and got about 66V AC.

That explains the spark; any notion why radio ground should show 66V AC?  I measured potential between my water pipe ground and house ground, and just got a few mV, so it's not coming from there.

Is it one of those cases where chassis is ground in the sense of the reference lowest voltage in the unit, but not necessarily 0 V AC to earth?

Thanks

[Day Radebaugh]

Here it is guys, home at last.  We put in an access panel on the back side, so that I could get to cables and presets.  Intend to install a silent fan system in bottom panels, the kind you'd find in an A/V system.  It's an excellent addition to my music room.

[David C. Poland]

A nice looking chair side solution for a monster sized Scott.

[Day Radebaugh]

Thanks for all your help on this, David.

[Dave]

Excellent cabinet execution Day ! 

Be nice and pull access door for photo of those big beautiful 6L6s.

Hope all’s well down on the ranch. Our lakes remain ice covered for a little longer, a Winter to forget !

[Day Radebaugh]

Here's an ugly pic of the cabinet from behind, showing the power supply section.  I oriented the power supply so that the 6L6's were as far away from the tuner section above it as possible.  I'll install a home theater type cooling fan and a grille on either side of the cabinet, in the lower panels on the sides see https://www.acinfinity.com/quiet-cabinet-fans/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIvc...

The fan will circulate air directly across the power supply section.  Luckily, the pigtail recep originally intended for phono section can be used to power fan when I switch unit on.

This has really been an endless winter.  My sister was in Higgins Lake a couple of weeks ago watching it snow.  Enough!

[David C. Poland]

The orientation of the power transformer with respect to the receiver may be a more important consideration than heat from he 6L6's and 5U4's