Lockdown here in the UK meant that I was able to work from home on my company laptop. As part of my impending retirement in June I have off loaded all my project work and other duties, so am just working in a support mentoring role for the last few weeks.
This has given me a reasonable amount of free time, so I have taken this opportunity to go through some of those boxes that have been labelled ‘....the rainy day projects when I have some spare time’.
One of the first items to appear was a 30B transformer. It was very dusty, turrets felt like they were lubricated in sand and the Bakelite case was looking very dull and sorry for itself.
I pulled it all down, hoovered and brushed out the coil stack, polished the brass min/max plates each side of the coil stack and ran the soldering iron over all the soldered joints while checking the wiring.
The control turrets and housings were cleaned and reset with a small amount of lubricant and run smoothly now. The case was given a good clean and it now shines nicely, as good as new. The voltage on each turret is just over 18V and the gauges are still operating which was a bonus. The last job to do was repaint all the raised numbers and letters for the speed settings. Below is a picture of four hours work. I just need to order a replacement green light cover to make it complete.
