Thanks for the encouragement, Alan. It will certainly be a challenge but absolutely nothing in comparison with what Andy Beer is doing to his HMV905. He is building it primarily from thin air as half the bits are missing and even winding his own scan coils
Now that really is something to behold!
I am away on the Isle of Wight for a bit and wasn't expecting to get anything done on the Pilot until I get back to the workbench next week. However, I had an evening to myself on Thursday so using a chest of drawers, some basic tools and a gas powered soldering iron, set 'to'.
I've never 'de-constructed' a tv before, at least not with the object of rebuilding it again. I made various sketches of key areas and labelled interconnecting wires and took various photos. Mind you, when I rebuild it, I will primarily follow the circuit diagram but I don't doubt I'll make a few wiring errors. It makes you realise how labour intensive these were to build with everything hand wired. The advent of the PCB must have reduced wiring errors considerably.
The layout of components is a bit surprising in this set and I would have thought they could have improved on it.
All the line output parts are on the RHS chassis so you would expect the valve next to this to be the line osc/ sync separator, but no, its the sound output valve! As far away as you can get from the volume control, speaker and source of signals!
Conversely, the signals board, all quite sensibly on a PCB, contains the line oscillator, so the drive to the line o/p valve has to trail round the chassis on a piece if wire suspended on wire ties
As Fernseh has already pointed out, some of the circuitry is a bit weird with reflex sound using the same valve to handle the IF and the audio
I am sure as I progress, more oddities will appear, but that all adds greatly to the interest.
By the end of the evening, progress was good with most of the key parts un-wired and the chassis panels ready to split.
Interestingly, the LOPT only has 4 connections to the outside world which are on spade connectors, so the whole assembly complete with rectifier takes seconds to remove. I wonder if they were expecting failures? It looks a sturdy, well made unit though and looks pretty good under the layer of grime. It has a good layer of wax which shows no signs of having melted so after being carefully dried out, will hopefully be ok.
On first glance, the Fireball tuner looks in a bad way. In fact, its mainly the case which has gone rusty and it's pretty good inside- just needs a very good clean and re-lubricate.
I now need to find a box to put all the bits in to move them back to Essex next week. Once back in the workshop, I can concentrate on the individual chassis panels.
Cheers Nick