Friends,
I am in process of assembling a Zenith 53 from two chassis. I selected a particular chassis because it had not been cut up with a chisel and hack saw to retro-fit a re-stuffed electrolytic Mershon. The better chassis is not without fault. Sometime in its life it had what appeared to be a quantity of lacquer spilled on it and it covered more than 3/4 of the chassis sealing in a layer of accumulated dirt. The lacquer could not be removed without removing the bronze paint that factory painted over the nickeled chassis. So the whole chassis was stripped of paint as well as transformers and tuning condenser. See below:
I do have to mask off areas of the chassis to prevent over spray on to components that are accessible through the openings in the chassis. That part of the masking is not a problem.
I am concerned that if the masking around the tube sockets is not done properly that there will be leakage of spray finish between the socket and the chassis or across the socket itself. I plan to use Rust-Oleum hammered gold rather than a standard bronze paint. There are some minor imperfections in the nickeled surface as well as shading that sometimes occurs with spray metallic finishes. The Hammered Gold is not without fault, it has to be applied in a thin then heavy coat to get it to "hammer". Somewhat like wrinkle paint. I am concerned that the surface will be wet enough that the paint may flow under masking in the sockets.
I am looking for suggestions to better mask the sockets short of drilling them out, I prefer not to do that...
Here is a closeup of a typical socket between transformer openings:
There is a new product called "Frog Tape" that may work. However, it seems to be intended to work with water based paints, how well it works with a solvent based paint is unknown...
Chas
