I spent a couple hours today doing a superficial cleaning of the Heathkit RA-1500.
(for backstory,
read this post. tl;dr version: My dad had one of these. This particular one was abandoned, I was given permission to take it home, and it works really well when it works.)
I had to photograph the front panel because of those sticky-note labels: The original button labels had gone away a long time ago, so these were the only convenient notes I had on what switched what. Thankfully, the button switches work really well, something that wasn't true of my dad's old receiver.
Real wood case on three sides. Impressively sturdy, especially by modern standards. Shame about that divot on the left side, but being tossed in a dumpster and having other hardware dumped on top can do that sort of thing.
The metal cabinet is also pretty sturdy. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the cabinet, or even the baseplate alone, accounts for at least half the total mass. And this thing is heavy; I haven't put it on a scale, but I'm guessing it's easily over 25 lb. The upper black steel panel screws down at about ten points, to similar-looking metal side panels that screw down at a dozen more points apiece. The lower panel is solid 1/8" steel; the interior equipment is mounted to spacers somewhere around 3/8" tall, so thankfully that dent in the perf near the rear left foot doesn't affect anything besides appearances. If you look carefully, you can see how thick the metal is in that shot...
The diagonal row of holes in the baseplate are for accessing trimpots. There are a few more inside.
A couple service tags and some glue residue from a third. This had traveled between the eastern end of Michigan and Benton Harbor, at the western end of Michigan, a few times.
The glorious innards. I went no further than this; I didn't feel confident taking things apart for real without having service manuals handy. It is still going to need a good, detailed cleaning inside, but this was actually as far as I had to go to access everything I wanted to spray Deoxit into...
...because even though I couldn't figure out how to get the knobs off, it turns out the pots are really easy to reach, and even have conveniently-located holes just the right size for a spray tube. Well, actually, since they're dual-mono pots, one was easy to spray, the other was hard. It worked out okay, though.
Another service tag. For a product made in America, this was a pretty well-traveled device.
The tuner mechanism is impressively elaborate: A taut cord runs in a loop through a capstan on the tuner knob, around a large disk (with an indexing wheel that stops it at its extreme points), and over the top of all the board interfaces to the front panel, spanning the width of the cabinet. Between the tuner knob and capastan is a massive, massive flywheel, so even though the tuner knob is relatively small, it's very easy to turn and fiddle with when trying to lock on a station. It's a shame the tuner doesn't work that well, albeit better than my dad's did. The metal arm that held the AM antenna is the saddest casualty. Now it's just a kind of annoying dongle that gets in the way.
All the lightbulbs present work, which is nice; one socket's empty, so I pulled a companion bulb to bring to the hardware store as a sample to find replacements with.
I'd love to, at some point, replace the power cord and phono sockets. The former because it's pretty ragged and worn, the latter because they're just kind of janky, even if the ceramic insulations are all in good shape. If I could keep the very nice perfed circuit board they're mounted to, and replace them each for each with modern-day sockets, I'd be happy. All in due time, I guess; they're working a little better now thanks to the Deoxit, but I'd rather have a more permanent fix than occasional blasts of contact cleaner.
I couldn't clean much -- partly because of a shortage of time, partly because I realized I'd be in over my head without a map. At this point, the most critical problem is the volume knob; the left-right imbalance is ridiculous at low volumes. Some shots of contact cleaner have helped (and has totally fixed some of the channel loss and glitchiness in the volume and balance knobs), but it's clear now that the low-volume imbalance is inherent to the hardware. I have no idea if good-quality pots to replace it with are even available, though -- again, I'll have to get a copy of the assembly/service manual to see what goes in there.
