Progress. The cabinet has been cleaned and scrubbed with Simple Green and dish detergent with a hot water rinse and dry. It is ready for spray paint which will be tomorrow. I pulled the front face plate and gave it the same treatment, along with the knobs and hardware. The pots and controls got a healthy spray of dexoit. Here it is assembled minus the banana jacks. Need new ones...on order. That jagged hole on the left was someone installed a BNC jack. I will install that too. Also the CRT bezel needs to be polished and painted.
Compare this pix with the one earlier today. A massive improvement.
Already an amazing transformation!
If it were mine... I'd seal the front around that BNC hole with tape, fill in the holes with epoxy, then find/make myself a cal sticker or "interesting" asset tag to cover the ugly.
mnem
Carry on, wayward son!
Cover up a bodge with another bodge? Surely you jest. Actually I plan on using the BNC. I even polished the jack so it's nice and shiny.
The BNC was a bodge. It was haphazardly done, and is not period-correct. This is
repair & restoration, which you're already engaged in.
I mean, sure... the
correct way to fix that bodge would be to scan the front panel, make a scale silk-screen from that scan, then strip the front panel, TIG those holes shut, grind it all down inside & out, pattern-sand the inside so the swirl-marks approximate original appearance, then repaint it with the correct (and IIRC, highly toxic) self-etching epoxy paint, then finally re-silk-screen the legend. (Or search for the next decade for a donor unit to replace that panel
)
I know how to do all these things.
But I am of the opinion that the equally valid restoration path is
repair to original operating standards, done as non-invasively as possible to preserve as much of the original manufacture as possible. An epoxy patch done from the inside achieves that, while preserving the original paint and legend over 99% of the device.
But I get your POV... it's the same old argument with car people... on the one hand you have the "restorers"... who want the correct screws and bolts everywhere, numbers matching, bias-ply tires and the correct paint splashes on the coil springs that the vehicle came with from the factory. I know how to do THAT as well.
On the other hand you have the hot-rodders who want to take something old that's been driven into the ground and make it something COMPLETELY NEW... like CADDZILLA below. I REALLLY know how to do that.
And then you have the resto-rod people... who try to walk the fine line between those two; keep it as original as possible, while adding
new stuff that doesn't require butchering the original vehicle. The problem you're facing is that
your project has already been butchered. The question now is whether you try and reverse that butchery as inconspicuously as possible with a little body work, or double down on the butchery and try to make it "a thing".
My personal opinion is that since
this 'scope is pretty much useless as a 'scope even with the bodged-in BNC jack, it is primarily a shelf-queen. As such, the former course is more appropriate.
Cheers,
mnem
*Veteran of a thousand psychic wars car projects*