gearhead222 wrote:
...as I replaced it awhile back with a dropping resistor after replacing the several series rectifiers that the original restorer did after removing the Selenium Rectifier...
There are a couple of reasons why the "Original Restorer" may have done this: first, having several silicon diodes in series may have been an attempt to mimic the forward voltage drop of the original (selenium) rectifier. This voltage drop would have been around 7 to 11 volts for a functional rectifier (failing ones tended to have high forward drops). With each silicon rectifier having a fixed forward voltage drop of 0.7V, the net voltage drop for the series string would have been 0.7V times the total device count.
Second, selenium rectifiers can burn out and "go open" but they are not known to short out. This is not the
case with silicon rectifiers: they not only can open up, they can sometimes short out, anode to cathode. This is a bad situation for the electrolytic caps downstream as it can subject them to reverse biasing, which will quickly destroy them. Perhaps the Original Restorer was attempting to avoid this scenario.