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Old 24th Nov 2022, 4:38 pm   #12
1100 man
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Join Date: Apr 2016
Location: Ventnor, Isle of Wight, & Great Dunmow, Essex, UK.
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Default Re: Rather grim Thorn 1400 - Marconiphone 4649

Quote:
Originally Posted by SunSPARC View Post
C52 12uF (4uF in early sets) which decouples HT4 often gets overlooked. It lurks down near the 30PL1 in the sound section. It will probably be a Callins horror.
Ah ha! SunSparc, you are spot on - well done! I looked more closely at the circuit last night and discovered they had put some effort into keeping 50Hz out of the line oscillator & sync DC amp valve. It's got its own HT supply, HT4 which is decoupled by C52. It was a 4mfd in my set and a rather odd orange TCC made thing with a green plastic base. I've not seen one of those before. Replacing that with a 4.7mfd got rid of almost all of the ripple on the scan. A 22mfd made things even better!


Quote:
On 1400's and early 1500's there was a must do modification on the width chain to prevent a fire.
The width control changed to 2.2Meg with the feed resistor increased to 680K.
many years ago I had a really good 1400 go up in flames because of this.
That's interesting, Simon. I've often wondered why the original 1 meg with 330K in series would cause any problems. After all, even though it's fed from the boost HT rail of 700V give or take, the current through the resistor & preset would only be 0.526ma. That equates to a power of 0.23W in the preset & 0.091W in the 330K resistor, assuming I've done that right!

The only thing I can think of is that presets & pots in general almost always seem to go low in value, whereas fixed resistors always go high. I wonder if the 1 meg preset gradually went lower in value causing the current through it to increase?

Anyway, my set had a 330K fitted, so I assume originally it would have had a 1 meg pot. Someone in the past had removed the 2.2 meg 'local distant' preset and fitted this in place of the width control - quite inventive I thought! That 2.2 meg has gone down to 1.5 meg!

Hopefully I can find a 2.2 meg that actually measures 2.2 meg ONO!

Thanks for the replies,
Cheers
Nick

Last edited by 1100 man; 24th Nov 2022 at 4:40 pm. Reason: spelling
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