- 2024
- Oct
- 26
A Hallicrafters S38-C recap.
I picked up this good example of a Hallicrafters S38-C at the 2024 Dayton Hamvention. While it doesn’t look to have had much done to it over the years, it had - of course - bad filters.
In order to remove the old capacitor, a single rivet has to be drilled out. Mine was just below and to the right of the audio output transformer:
In order to work on the chassis better, I removed it from the case. To do this, you’ll need to do the following:
1: Remove the knobs. These are secured by a 1/16th hex screw. See the warning about the feet below.
2: Remove the feet. These are probably brittle and going to break on you.
3: Unsolder the speaker.
The chassis just pulls out at this point. The paint is pretty thin on these units and will scratch easily. I did so :(
Once you’ve drilled out the rivet, it should allow you to pull the old capacitor off the shaft and pop the remainder of the rivet out. I simply cut the leads on the capacitor to get it out of the way but leave a trace in place for the new parts.
This particular capacitor has 4 sections - 40/40/60/20 - all are 150V except for the 20, which is 50V. All of the sections on mine tested ok for capacitance except the 60. This showed practically nothing.
That doesn’t mean the rest of them were any good, they all showed high ESR and loss.
(Oh boy, did I mess that up! Negatives going the wrong direction…It was…yeah, not enough coffee!)
I kind of did a sloppy job here and I’m not really the happiest with the way they lay, but they’re secure. You’ll notice that there is no 20μF - that’s because some stupid little piggy ordered non-polarized parts instead of regular parts. That’s ok…I need to replace the across-the-line bumblebee as well, so another trip to mouser.com is in order.
This particular bumblebee was coated with some nasty oily substance, but I’m not taking any chances. It gets replaced - even if it was good. I also need new feet for the device, some were worn down and one cracked apart. There’s a supplier for those, so I’ll order some and let you know how it goes.
So…into the waiting room it goes.
Stay tuned!