April 2008 -
I looked under the chassis for the first time.. What was immediately obvious was that there were some fireworks under that chassis at one point. They say pictures say 1000 words..

From what I can see, there are at least two coils that are rather crisp.. The first is Zenith Part 20-88 Antenna Choke. This may be available in a few other chassis. The other part is the 20-109 Wave Trap assembly. I am pretty sure the trimmer is salvageable, but the coil is open, and will need to be replaced..

The rub of course is that I can find no specs on the old Zenith coil parts.. Other than track down similar coils from another chassis. Since the functions of these coils are fairly standard, I will try to find something that can be used.

How they came to be fried of course is another interesting mystery.. The antenna post is no longer insulated from the chassis.. and wires around the area are charred.. There was obviously some serious "juice" comming in that antenna wire.. Must have been mighty interesting when that set started smoking! A nearby lightening strike is the most likely cause.

I had noticed a wire trailing out from under the chassis before.. which made me wonder.. until I saw the charred remains.. Obviously after the incident, the RF Amp no longer functioned.. so they tapped into a trimmer on the other end of the RF Amp and fed in the antenna there.. (problem solved..!!)

June 2008 -
My next task is to go through the top chassis and replace the capacitors and check for drifting resistors. The chassis is HUGE, and there are a LOT of caps under the chassis. I find this somewhat daunting.

I am not sure yet whether I will restuff the old caps with new capacitors and replace them so that they look as the originals. It sould seem that this can take a long time, and I have not had much experience with this. In any case, I certainly will save all removed components to preserve the option.

If there is one thing I am learning is that a digital camera can come in very handy in remembering where everything was, so I took some photos of the underside of the chassis. These photos will help guide me as I work my way through the chassis. I am thinking that I may annotate some of the photos to guide others to where particular components are on the radio. This is similar to what I did with the bottom chassis.

I took multiple views as sometimes I found it helped in clarifying what was really going on under that chassis. Often one part can obscure another, and having a couple of different angles helps see around obstructions.

Top Chassis Rebuild
Underside Left View #1	Underside Right View #1
Underside Left View #2	Underside Right View #2
Underside Left View #3	Underside Center View #1