The cabinet has come up lovely! The Stella badge looks good too 🙂
Regards,
Lloyd
+1
Thanks Gent's. ?
An ultra fine sanding and then another coat of finish should be enough.
Like EmleyMoor said above, I prefer to have things they way thery were too. The good thing is that if I feel the need to get the Stella badge the same as before or paint a dark band to match the original appearance of the cabinet front, I still can.
It was interesting to note that the dark original band was hand painted around the top and sides (some brush strokes were visible), but sprayed onto the lower piece of wood across the base. This was probably done before final assembly of the cabinet, and was in fact a bit lighter than the rest of the painted band.
The chassis has been installed back into the cabinet now that the final coat has dried. I will run the set for a while to be sure all is well. The mask surrounding the CRT cuts off a good size of the screen, almost half of an inch all round.
Refering to this picture, you can see just how much of the picture is now obscured by the mask.
Thanks Frank, wish I had a showroom to put it in.
It's good to finally get the covers back in place and sit and watch the set.
As far as the cosmetics go, I will not use the word "restoration" as to do so would imply bringing back to exactly as original. That I cannot do as I don't have the same material as was used at the cabinet 'makers. All in all though, I feel I have achieved a sensible improvement, certainly as far as the battered appearance it once had goes.
Following on from Till's adventures with his set here,
https://www.radios-tv.co.uk/community/black-white-tvs/stella-st1007/paged/4/
I decided to make a couple of minor modifications. An improvement to a beam-current limiter I had fitted, and a switch-off spot eliminator. The beam-current was previously unlimited and I felt some control of this was needed.
The spot eliminator was very simple and just involved moving one wire from the earthy end of the brightness control from it's chassis ground to the direct incoming neutral side of the mains supply switch. When switched off, there is an open circuit from the brightness to ground causing a brief moment of maximum brightness and this discharges the CRT as the raster collapses. Then no extremely bright spot can be displayed, thus saving the screen from any burn possibility.
The beam-current limiter I had fitted previously simply consisted of a 100k resistor in parallel with a 0.1uf capacitor to the CRT cathode. It worked ok, but a slightly more refined method was to fit a diode in parallel with a 0.22uf capacitor and a 470k resistor to ground. It was convenient to fit these components on the CRT base as there was a ground connection for the heater. The result of this modification is a distinct halt to silly levels of beam-current as the brightness or contrast is increased.
