T.
:I love the smell of old electronics, musty and moldy as they may be. When I heat up old solder joints I feel like I get a whiff of the day 50, 60 70 or more years ago that they were first joined.
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Ed.
Thanks for that smellivisual.
Richard
:Nothing beats the smell of burning mouse urine when you are soldering a joint on a 20's radio.
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:Ed.
Oh yeah the other one - old service manuals - you either love or hate that musky smell.
marv
:I can beat that - I was building audio amps with a guy a few years ago - A new amp was put on burn-in - worked well for a couple of hours - we went to lunch -we came back to a house full of smoke - the power transformer used was a vintage one and couldn't handle the current.
: Personally I would never leave a new product unattended like that - but he was the boss ! It didn't help that he threw a 5 amp fuse in there for the test.
: The smell of a burnt power transformer is very acrid - very distinct - the smell lingered for days.
: When I go look at vintage radios for sale ; one of the first things I do is stick my nose in the back and have a whiff (carefully - you never know what might jump out !!)
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: Oh yeah the other one - old service manuals - you either love or hate that musky smell.
:
I bought a 37' Admiral console on craigslist and imediately went to get it. When I got to the guys house, he said that it had been in the barn for years (yay), and that it was his grandfaters. he proceeded to plugg it in, and power it up. It did, it hummed. It Smelled terrible (moldy) mainly from the grille cloth. I put it in may car with out much thought and paid him the money. I got it home and began to dissasemble it. The radio had a copper plated chassis , it was no longer shiny or in good condition. In the back there was a part of the chassis that had rusted away ( like salt does to car doors). Really sharp jagged rust. There was also a band of green/blue (from the copper)above a spot in the chassis that only was steel, no copper.I took off the knobs, took out the speaker and cloth, and began to remove the chassis screws. There were only 3 :) . The First came out without much trouble. The next two , in the back of the radio needed wd40. One I was able to turn a few times then it froze, and I stripped the head. The other didnt turn at all. I tried to cut them off , no success. I decided to cut the chassis out from the radio by destroying the pices of wood the chassis rested on. after freeing the bolts from the rotted wood I began to slide the chassis out. Mouse house imediately began to come out of the chassis. I reached to the front of the chassis to grab a different spot, and grabbed a huge pile of carpet threads, newspaper, fibers and everything else. I removed the pile. I slid the chassis out of the radio, and flipped it over. I had to leave it smelled so bad. After wrapping my nose and mouth under a bandana I continued to remove fluff. I grabbed handfull after handfull of fluff and put it on my driveway. The smell kept getting worse. after the fist layer was gone, I began to find "Them". Onve all of the fluff was gone, I went through it, looking for any radio parts, and I found 19 mouse skulls, 4 intact mouse skeletons, and hundreds of little bones and jaws. I got a hammer and completely removed the chassis platform. Most of the cloth on the wires was gone, the power transformer leads are all bare, some caps are chewed, all contacts are dirty, and it stinks. There was a layer of dirt/poo/urine/dust/time on the chassis. I completely removed it all, wire brushes,sand paper, sander, files, and chemicals. I seald it uner a nice thick layer of copper spraypaint. (no smell :). The under side got a huge amount of chemicals. I put it in the sun so that it would first dry completely, then sprayed it with disenfectant spray, air freshener, clorox cleanup bleach spray, and almost every other good smelling cleaner I could find. after the liquid drained off the wires, there was a green liquid left in the chassis. I drained it and repeted . After an entire bottle of febrezze and lysol, the smell began to subside. The air freshener made it smell like flowers. ( So did I after an accident that resulted in a small hole in the can, which made all of the air freshener come out over the course of several minutes.) The radio is now inside my house in my collection , the cabinet has been redone, and the radio has been demoused. I don't know if I will ever get the radio going, it is a 12 tube radio. The component seem all there but I am unsure of operational capabilites. It is not anywhere near the top of the "To restore list"
Ian
::I brought home a zenith stars and stripes console from Lansing a couple of years ago - couldn't get one of the chassis bolts out - gave it a good spray of wd40 - came back an hour later - dead mouse beside the radio - I thought - where'd that come from - took the chassis out and underside was stuffed full of mouse nest - can't believe we didn't smell that on the trip back - anyway - chassis cleanup wasn't that bad - but mouse urine on the shelf - tried a couple things - didn't help much - then I went and got a spray bottle of Febreze - really soaked it - let it dry - no more mouse smell.
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:When I got my 912 tube tester, it had that musty 'basement' smell everytime I opened it up. I tried Febreze, setting the chassis in the sun for hours, etc. Nothing worked. Finally, I stuffed the thing with Bounce dryer sheets. Finally, the supplemental papers, the cabinet, everything smells freah as a daisy.
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