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McCurdy console bulb replacement

C

CatFM

If anyone has experience replacing bulbs in switches on McCurdy consoles, I would appreciate some advice on how to do it. My attempts to pull the bulbs out of the sockets haven't worked and I don't want to risk breaking them without knowing how it should be done. There doesn't seem to be anything about it in the manual.

Also, if anyone has a McCurdy parts board, there are a few odds and ends I am looking for. One is simply a few of the white plastic strips that fit between the sections of modules.

Thanks!
 
CatFM said:
If anyone has experience replacing bulbs in switches on McCurdy consoles, I would appreciate some advice on how to do it. My attempts to pull the bulbs out of the sockets haven't worked and I don't want to risk breaking them without knowing how it should be done. There doesn't seem to be anything about it in the manual.

Also, if anyone has a McCurdy parts board, there are a few odds and ends I am looking for. One is simply a few of the white plastic strips that fit between the sections of modules.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

It is not exactly a "parts board,” in fact it is in pretty good shape, but we have a McCurdy console that could use a new home. There is a picture of it at: http://www.chalkhillmedia.org/Museum/newstuff.htm

You can email me from that web site if you like. Oh, did I mention that this thing is incredibly heavy? It is. Transformers seem to do that....
 
CatFM said:
If anyone has experience replacing bulbs in switches on McCurdy consoles, I would appreciate some advice on how to do it. My attempts to pull the bulbs out of the sockets haven't worked and I don't want to risk breaking them without knowing how it should be done. There doesn't seem to be anything about it in the manual.

Also, if anyone has a McCurdy parts board, there are a few odds and ends I am looking for. One is simply a few of the white plastic strips that fit between the sections of modules.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

About the lamps... I'm not sure but the switches seem similar to the ITC Delta cart machine ones. I use a long nose plier and soft and steadly pinch the bulb, then I pulled de lamp out. They look like a very small neon lamp, with no socket.
 
a much better way to remove a bulb in one of those switches is with a small piece of heat shrink tubing. Just slide it snugly over the bulb and pull it out. On the rare occasion you need a little extra grip just slide a small section on and carefully shrink it with your heat gun. It's something I've been doing for years.
 
Bill DeFelice said:
a much better way to remove a bulb in one of those switches is with a small piece of heat shrink tubing. Just slide it snugly over the bulb and pull it out. On the rare occasion you need a little extra grip just slide a small section on and carefully shrink it with your heat gun. It's something I've been doing for years.
Click to expand...

Similarly, I used to have a set of needle-nose pliers whose tips I had heat-shrinked, for just this purpose, to make it easier to grab the bulb. Worked pretty well, IIRC. In retrospect, using pieces of live rubber tubing on the pliers tips would probably worked better, since it's not as slick as heat shrink.

Without the heat-shrink/rubber, bare metal pliers have a nasty habit of crushing the bulb. You think you had a problem before?
;)

Kind Regards,
David
 
Thanks for the ideas! I was thinking along the lines of some small tubing because I tried some variations of small needle nose pliers and large tweezers with some tape wrapped around them for grip and padding, but no luck that way. I definitely didn't want to risk shattering the bulb. By the way, are those bulbs hard to find? Since I haven't been able to pull one out yet, I'm not even sure what type they are.
 
Years ago we had a Harris MicroMac board. Our engineer at the time came up with a nifty way to change the bulbs. He took a reel of Belden twisted pair wire, and cut off about a foot long piece. He then removed the internal wires and tin foil shield, and volia! All you had to do was slide the strawlike Belden insulation cable over the bulb and then pull it out. If the bulb was stubborn, all you had to do was rotate the "straw" by a few degrees, and then the bulb would come right out.
 
By the way, I'm wondering how many McCurdy consoles are still in regular use on air or in production. Considering that they were built like battleships, they should be around for a very long time. Does anyone know of any still in regular use?
 
We have two of them (the blue ones) an 8820 and 8816 in service. In fact, I just finished a complete restoration of the 8816. They were originally at WMAQ, then went to WNEW in New York, stopped at WJUX (our owner was the former chief of WNEW-FM) and now live here. I bought them after WJUX was sold. Aside from re-chipping and re-capping, they just soldier on and are still ruler flat to almost 50khz with no measurable crosstalk. Not bad for boards built in 1983! In fact, better than our Audioarts R55e that we just bought this year. The hardest parts to find are some of the cmos chips and the SSM2015 mic pres.

If you are looking for some odds and ends parts, try calling McCurdy. I was stuck on some buttons and switches, and they have an entire warehouse with parts still laying around for these things!

These things were the PR&E of Canada. In fact, the man I spoke with at McCurdy remembered the install at WMAQ and remarked that they put themselves out of the console business because "we made them too well".
 
DNDSH237 I had hoped I would never hear the words Harris Micromac again,
we had serial # 1 and 2 at WMJX-FM in Boston.......the nightmare of all nightmares

The consoles went ballistic every time the building elevators went up and down, had to run them on a harmonic neutralized Sola regulator and that was just the beginning.

Four months later they were replaced with new PR&E BMX-II's and returned to Harris where I thinks they were dumped off on some poor bastard in Iowa just
before they sent the Micromac line into oblivia.
 
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