August has been particularly busy. Trying to get the Rover back on the road, repairing a Philips 148, an AWA 535GA tablegram, and refurbishing a Duel 1010 for fitting to the AWA. I'll work my way backwards.
The Duel 1010 went well until the end. It's intended to be a replacement for the Colero 78 rpm only unit in the AWA. While the Colero works quite well, it's not practical as a useful turntable. I picked up the Duel at a HRSA junk sale day. Let's just say it needed a fair amount of work. All went well until I tried to put a main pivot screw back in. It's literally 1mm short and won't bite. They must have used a press or something at the factory.
The AWA 535GA chassis there were no problems and it sounds really good. AWA make nice upper end radios and this is no exception. The wooden cabinet is progressing well. I have stripped the lid and so far applied about 10 coats of shellac. It'll probably needs 50-60 coats. The weather has turned nasty after a long warm sunny spell, so it's going to be a slow process.
Finally to the Rover. After replacing the fuel injectors (the plastic had disintegrated), the car was running nicely, probably better than when I bought it. However, the day before I was about top take it to the RWC station, the ABS and Traction Control (TC) came on and stayed on. It always played up intermittently. As these and the airbag and cruise control are on the same ECU (computer) it was hard to know where to start. The airbag light came on at intervals, but cleared. We took the wheels off to check all the hall effect sensors. The ABS light returned to intermittent. So it was the TC. The car does a self test of the system that involves a motor, a stupidly long cable, a butterfly on the air intake, which turns a potentiometer that gives feed back to the ECU. A simple system really. The Rover shares a lot of parts with BMW's of the era. The TC uses a BMW cruise control motor. All fine and good, apart from the fact the self test is quite violent and strips the gears in the motor unit. Apart from the body of the unit being impossible to get apart, the double gear is nylon and impossible to get hold of. BMW want $1500 plus GST for a unit, the car cost $1800. So onto Autodesk Fusion 360 to design a new gear. My printer, another long sorry story, doesn't print Nylon, so finding an engineering company' who had the time was a 2 day job. It's currently being printed. Time will tell if it the printing is fine enough and strong enough.