[Closed] Philips 563A Radio/Television Table Model

Black polyprop caps are also available in the Ansar Supersound range from Cricklewood here http://www.cricklewoodelectronics.com/C ... hp?cat=155. And I'll let you into a little-known secret - the UK people who actually make these are prepared to sell relatively small quantities (e.g. 100 off - and maybe fewer ?) for much less than the high street prices. If you can generate a significant need for them then I'd recommend contacting sales@suppression-devices.com. They were very helpful indeed when I called.

VB

Here is the website of suppression devices.com:

http://suppression-devices.com/index.htm

I'll enquire what sort of price they offer me for say, 100 0.1microfarad 630 volt capacitors.

Till Eulenspiegel.

I was reading through some post-war Practical Wirelesses this morning (prior to donating them to the Dave Moll archive at the NVCF tomorrow) and I came across this amusing little piece in the July 1948 one (p 269). Maybe when your set is finished Brian we can celebrate with one of these .

VB

Hi VB & Brian,

After having man handled Brian's set and seeing the weight of that cake I don't reckon there's much difference between them !

Marc.

One thing's for sure, that cake wasn't a sponge cake. It must have been a real fruit cake, just like they used to make. However, you would think that the chef would get the knob spacing correct - the knobs should be equally spaced across the set! But there again, I was always a pedant!

That's a nice "slice" of history, albeit a rather big slice.

I wonder if they used the same sort of lifting tackle that we used to get it in and out of our cars! - A forklift truck and a crane.

Marion

You're absolutely right about the weight of the 563A. After picking it up from Valvebloke, I carried it from the car into the house and onto the kitchen table and boy, was that a stupid thing to do ?
I have had an operation on one of my knees to clean up some cartilage and was told not to lift anything heavy. Well, I thought, it's only a tele! I'm sure I did some more damage and limp a little more BUT IT WAS WORTH IT

I've cleaned up the RF section of the set and tried some stuff called SCALE-X which is phosphoric acid. I am delighted with the result - has anyone else used it? The chassis had surface rust but not too much but the proliferation of self-tappers poking through the top of the chassis made it very difficult to clean without a certain amount of pain . I just painted the Scale-X on to the metalwork and after 5 mins, scrubbed it with 3M Non-Wover scour pads (much safer than steel wool and it's non-conductive.
I didn't take the radio tuning cap off as it is associated with one of those (in)famous Philips steel wire drives and I no wish to disturb that!
Power/TB section will be more difficult as it is much more tightly packed but I'll do that bit later and in order to make it a bit easier (because of the weight), I will separate the two sections as all the electrical connections are via the two tag strips at the front of the chassis combo.

Hi Brian,

Wow what a result
Where did you buy the "Scale X" from ?
I reckon I could put that to good use on quite a few jobs I have lined up.

TTFN
Marc.

Wow, Brian,

That is mega-impressive.

Now I can safely say, Charlie (the seller) didn't have a budgie in his house, so those seed husks and feather must have been there for quite a while.

I wonder if my granddad ever laid hands on that set. He was quite a prolific budgie breeder in his spare time, but this set would have been seriously stretching his area unless it was relocated from the North side of York?.

Marion

Hi Brian,

I've just had a terrible thought... Way back in about 1964, my granddad turned his GEC BT2155 into a budgie cage for my granny (I still think she would have been better with a chair..... bum-bumm).

What a twist of fate if your set had been in his hands, and had been in the firing line for the same treatment?

Doesn't bear thinking about - does it?

Marion

Yes, Marion. I'm very pleased that he didn't get it!

Mark, The Scale X came from ebay:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/like/25083189 ... 108&ff19=0

No problems with the supplier.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the info.

How much "Scale X" did you get through cleaning the chassis as I noticed that 500ml is £12 plus £5 postage but they also do 5 Litre with free post for £27 which if you get through quite a bit of the stuff would be a big saving.

Marc.

Hi Marc
I've hardly made a hole in it. I applied it with an artist's brush which is about 3/16" in diameter and just a thin coat on the chassis. I would say that the 500ml would be enough for a load of TVs. However, on reflection the 5L offer sounds a lot better value for money. I suppose it all depends on how much rust you want to remove but if you live in a hard water area, there are many other uses for the stuff - and I live in a hard water area

Today, after separating the two parts of the chassis, I changed all the paper caps in the RF chassis, tested the valves and replaced some very badly perished rubber insulation including the inter-chassis mains wiring. The chassis was then powered up using a bench PSU - result no sound.
The fault was traced to a short circuit within a screened cable, just like the problem Till found with the D16T TV he's restoring. Replacing the cable cured the problem so I decided to do it "properly". I wanted the wiring to look the same as before using the bright yellow PVC sleeving that was original used. This meant finding decent screened cable that fitted within the sleeving. So I had to make some!
I am fortunate enough to have some PSF1/3, a double screened coax once used in the TV broadcast industry which I was able to strip to extract the inner of the screens to use. Once the screen, which is very tightly woven, was extracted, I was able to thread silicon rubber through the screening to form the complete cable. Winding tinned copper wire round the ends of the cable after cutting to length completes the assembly.
The resulting cable is almost a complete match to the original and is very inexpensive.
The picture shows the PSF1/3 coax, the inner screen and a couple of cables ready for installation.

It's time to re-stuff the electrolytics. Not too much of a sweat - except there are 8 of the screw-fitting types. I must apologise to Lloyd here because I said that the caps in Aiden's Philips were not the wet type - they are! I'm sorry about that. .
In order to open them, I knocked the cap off with the back of a wood chisel which exposed a vent which is about 1/2" in diameter and long enough to grip in a lathe chuck so I did just that and supported the screw end with a 2BA bolt in the tailstock as a centre to stabilise the cap. Then, with the lathe running as slowly as possible, I very carefully cut the end nearest the chuck off with a specially ground, very thin parting tool (I know one shouldn't part using a centre but I did need the extra support given by the centre).
The ends came off very easily, with the electrolyte pouring into a plastic tray of the takeaway food variety exposing the strange innards which were removed by drilling out the swaging which held the positive connection solder tag and punching the assembly out of the can. The picture shows the eight capacitors, their guts and cans. I assume that the more slots cut into the aluminium cylinders there are, the lower the capacity!

Re-stuffing requires the original solder tag to be re-fitted with a 2BA screw, head on the outside and a washer and solder tag on the inside. The 5/8" screw is fitted with a second solder tag on the inside of the can. This is simply done by soldering the positive connection wire to a tag and fitting the nut and tightening using a nut runner. For the negative connection, a very small hole is drilled in the Bakelite base so that a .7mm tinned copper wire can pass through from the new capacitor to make contact with the chassis when it is back in position. The original cap, removed for the extraction of the original guts can be carefully pressed onto the top of the re-stuffed capacitor and it looks as though nothing has been done to it!
More pictures later.

Very interesting Brian, the 'guts' certainly look strange compared to any cans I have restuffed, trust Philips to be different!

I have always used coaxial cable outers for screening braid as I posted a little earlier. However, this only copes with the smaller cable bundles of up to 6mm. The following company does what they call Sleeving Braid for up to over 25mm!

http://www.dtl-connectors.co.uk/store/c ... aid+copper
(I have no connection with this company except to complain about their extremely high shipping charges! Their prices are a little high too so if anyone can find a cheaper source, please let us know.)

The range is quite extensive but with 2 or 3 types, most requirements can be met. The pictures show a harness I made for the CRT scan/focus yoke. Unfortunately I had to cut the original screened harness in order to remove it from the chassis but at least the new one is bright and shiny!

A bit more progress - almost to the stage of switch-on!!!
The TB chassis has been a bu@@er. Most of the rubber insulation had either hardened and was cracking or had gone all gooey so nothing for it but to change what was necessary. The 4 holf/amplitude pots were all wired using screened cable and this was very unstable so, using my newly sourced sleeving braid (3mm), I replaced the lot. I feel much more confident with that done. There weren't many pitch covered paper caps to change and many of the resistors were fine.
Philips have some strange ideas, some good and some bad, and this TV seems to incorporate many of them - the EHT flyback voltage doubler rectifier (2 x HVR2) 4V heaters are powered via a high insulation step-down transformer connected across the 6.3V heater winding. This results in a small transformer that, presumably, was much easier to manufacture and more reliable than two high insulation windings on the main power Xfmr. The heaters for all the TV only valves in the set are powered from a second mains Xfmr which enables the switching to be a simple single pole, low power switch.
The video amplifier valve is an EBL31 - quite unusual but the diodes are not wasted! One is used for vision DC restoration on the CRT (grid drive) and the sync separator (positive going vision so the usual system on grid-current restoration won't work). The other diode in the EBL31 is used as a rectifier to produce a negative bias for the vision RF and amp sections. A separate winding on the power Xfmr provides the oompf!
So far, I have seen a sawtooth from the Frame TB but no more. The set uses 5 ECH35s, three of which are in terminal decline so I need to get half a dozen in.
The pictures show the progress.

That is a work of art, Brian.. As ever, I take my (metaphorical) hat off to you.

Marion