[cathoderay57]

The repro dial came up quite well. I bought the 2mm glass plate from a local glass merchant cut to size for a couple of quid. I reversed the image and pasted the jpg file into MS Word and resized it to get it exactly right to fit the glass. The water slide transfer paper is quite inexpensive but there are different types for laser printers and inkjet printers, and white or clear papers so you need to get the right one. Clear is needed for this job but any white on the dial will print as clear as my inkjet printer isn't capable of printing white. Clear font station names works fine for this dial because there is a second rear glass plate that acts as a diffuser for the scale lamps. It is painted white and on my scrap set the paint had flaked badly so I scraped off the remainder and resprayed it with matt white primer, 2 coats. There is an image of the finished dial below - not perfect but not too shabby. Before soaking the transfer for application to the glass I sprayed it with a couple of coats of clear lacquer. I then took a long look at the scrap Mullard MAS281/15 chassis and ran a few tests. The mains transformer worked perfectly. All of the valves tested serviceable although the EM34 magic eye was missing. The audio output transformer was a Radiospares replacement - on these sets the transformers often suffer from o/c windings. (I forgot to mention that my wood-cased 281/15 described above had a failed AF o/p transformer that was kindly rewound for me by Ed Dinning). I came to the conclusion that the scrap chassis was too good to dismantle for spares so I began looking for a bakelite cabinet. Again I came up trumps on eBay and managed to buy one plus the right speaker. This time it arrived but unfortunately had been severely damaged by the courier (see pics below). As you can see I did repair it using Superglue, a bead of Araldite on the inside, Milliput filler and red/brown enamel paint and as the damage is at the side I guessed it might be useable. However, meanwhile I had recognised that the chassis fixings for the Mullard are different to those of the Philips. Sideband very kindly came to the rescue with not only the fixings but also a baffle board, back, knobs and a replacement cabinet which arrived safely today. Next post I will show differences in the fixings. Cheers for now, Jerry