Allen:
An excerpt from the Opus. I'm sure you can identify.
Eric
Boat anchors generally have more moving parts than modern radios. You have things like dial cords, gears, racks, toggle switches, rotary switches, and variable capacitors to contend with. Fortunately, these items are all large enough to be visible by the naked eye. After you “recapacitate” your “new” boat anchor, the next thing you’re going to want to do is drench everything that even remotely moves with a good contact cleaner/lubricant. Back in the olden days, this meant carbon tetrachloride, but it was discovered a while back that “carbon tet” caused people to grow superfluous cranium-like appendages or something like that, so the substance is now banned. They have more politically correct chemicals for contact cleaning these days. When all else fails, a good dose of WD-40 serves as a fairly respectable contact cleaner...but doesn’t smell anywhere near as nice as carbon tet.
Genuine dial cord is a bit hard to find these days, and more than likely your boat anchor will need a re-stringing. The next best thing is good Dacron fly-fishing line; it’s very tough and doesn’t stretch. If you do it right, you’ll probably never have to do it again. (Famous last words!) Replacing dial cord is another art form in itself, and if the original one happens to be missing, it can be a real challenge to figure out which way everything is supposed to turn. There seemed to be no limit to the creativity of radio designers when it came to devising convoluted, circuitous, unnecessarily complicated dial cord paths! After the ultimate demise of the dial cord, these designers, by this time all centenarians and senile, were pulled out of retirement to design the Windows operating system.
