Wireless Set No. 52 Canadian - Project

[David Dunlop]

I decided to perform a quick check-up on the Hickok 209A today before getting back to the two Spare Parts Cases.

It only took a few moments to realize this meter was actually not NOS, but a purchase that had been very carefully used and maintained over the years, to the point the purchaser had kept the original shipping box to store the meter in, while not in use. The AC cord originally equipped on the 209A was a rubber cord, 8 feet long, with the name HICKOK cast into the sides of the plug, which was a basic two pin plug. The AC cord presently on the meter is a black plastic one with a polarized plug, only 6 feet in length.

The front panel of this meter is a solid sheet of almost one eighth inch thick aluminum. The case is formed sheet steel with a coat of blue/grey enamel inside and out that has only three small chips on it. The bottom and the back of the case have four feet pressed into the steel and none of them have any trace of wear on the paint at all.

The chassis had the usual accumulation of static dust on the components that brushed away very easily and the clips for the two D-Cells used to power the Resistance function were both empty.

I had a pair of about half power D-Cells on hand that I installed, and I carefully pulled he four valves and ran them through my tube tester. Only V2, the 6X5GT Capacity Voltage Rectifier, failed at 32% on both sides. The other three valves in the chassis came in between 68% and 92%. With no spares on hand, the four original valves went back in for the purposes of live checks of the ability of the circuits to be zero set. The manual gives nice instructions for these tests.

The mechanical zero set of the meter before power up was spot on perfect and that huge meter is a delight to read! Even after a 5 minute warm up, with the wonky valve, none of the functions could be zeroed, but the meter did respond in each instance in the right way. Even the weak batteries in the Resistance Mode gave the correct response, stopping about 20 points off reaching full scale.

On powering off, the meter needle dove below zero on the scale and then quickly came back up to zero as the capacitors in the circuits bled out. So overall, in spite of no probes and leads yet, I am quite pleased with where this part of the project is headed.

The other interesting thing was finding a shipping label on the box from the Railway Express Agency dated August, 1948. This shipping company was a giant in its day; think modern day FEDEX. Worth looking up its history for a good read and discovering where todays American Express credit card company got its start, along with several other companies.



David

[David Dunlop]

Another stinky hot day today so I got all the errands/chores done early and retired to the basement to paint the two Spare Parts Cases. Both are now done save for any small touch ups after they have hard cured for a couple of weeks.

The green case, I will be adding to the 52-Set kit is the one in the foreground and the grey one is behind it.

The more I work with this Flat Olive Green colour that Canadian Marconi used on the 52-Set, the more it fascinates me. Note how, strictly on the way available light strikes the paint, the rear case looks olive green but the front one looks more like No. 2 Brown and out in the daylight this colour almost self-camouflages.

Once the hard cure is reached, I will be adding the stencil IDs to both cases.



David

[David Dunlop]

Oops!

I got a little ahead of myself in the last Post. That was actually just the first coat of Flat Olive Green paint. I got the second coat applied this evening and am still on target for the hard cure to be reached in 12 more days.


David

[David Dunlop]

Halfway through the hard cure time for the two cases now so I was able to get them right side up on the desk once again to finish the remaining week of curing.

There are a few small paint runs on one of the lips of one case that will need to be gently sanded down and possibly retouched once the paint is fully hardened but other than that, I will be able to get the Oil Board Stencil for the markings test fitted for the application of the original factory markings.


David

[David Dunlop]

A quick shift in focus to an earlier, related topic.

Jordan Baker sent me the attached photo of a pair of 52-Set Tool Boxes currently for sale on FB Market Place. $50.00 each, or the pair for $75.00.

The interesting thing about them is they still have most of their original factory Flat Olive Green paint and original stencils. These two boxes bring the total number of current survivors I am aware of to five in all. Four in Canada, including mine, and one in the UK. Three in Canada are still original externally, as is the one in the UK, whereas mine had gone NATO.

For the people interested in the 52-Set, the Tool Box seems to be the more difficult accessory to find, compared to the other two wooden cases. The prevalent thought for this phenomenon seems to be that at some point after the war and before the conversion to NATO Standard Paint in the Canadian Army, somebody in the Supply System realized the tools contained within this particular box for the 52-Set were nothing more than standard hand tools already held in supply under their own stock numbers. So the story goes these tool boxes were stripped of their tools which went back into the supply system under their individual stock numbers and the empty boxes were ‘destroyed, burned, or buried’, depending on which version of the information you encounter. The only survivors were tool boxes that had already been issued and which were in use. Being in use, they all got the NATO treatment paint-wise.

The fact three tool boxes have now turned up in Canada with original paintwork suggests the prevailing story is not entirely true and more documentation on the matter may eventually turn up clarifying it all.

It would make sense if you had a large number of fully equipped tool boxes sitting in a depot unused to redistribute their contents, but it is probably unlikely the entire stock was written off. It would still have been prudent to keep a limited supply of complete tool boxes on hand to replace any that were lost from the ones then in service. Same goes for the boxes themselves. A number on empty boxes were probably retained in the inventory to replace damaged or lost ones in use. When the 52-Set was finally declared obsolete and disposed of, surviving boxes in the supply system were then sold off and it is these items showing up today.

Still nice to know, however, that 80 year old items for the 52-Set keep turning up from time to time.


David

[David Dunlop]

The factory ID stencils are now on the two Spare Parts cases and this step in the project is now done. The case I will be keeping is the one on the left in the first photo.

The mystery now will be trying to figure out the most logical way the staff at the factory packed these cases upon completion with the required items. The photos in the manual give some clue but a lot of decisions will be in the realm of ‘Best Guess’ I suspect.

The second photo is just the Tool Box and the Spare Parts Case sitting side by side. Probably been a while for either of them since that last happened.


David

[David Dunlop]

You may recall when I was working on the other two boxes/cases for the 52-Set, the presence of a tan/yellow paint on the front of these items kept popping up. Well this last case to be restored for the project, the Cases, Operating, Remote Receiver, should finally explain what was going on.

Subsequent to the original factory finishing of the three boxes/cases for the 52-Set by Canadian Marconi Company, this equipment went through several upgrades while in service with the Canadian Army, throughout the later 40’s and 1950’s. This typically involved a repaint in the new NATO green that had entered the system, and slight variations to the stencilling, which was still in white paint, but usually in different locations on the front panel of the box/case, and quite often included deletion of the CMC Part Number information.

Around 1960, when the new NATO Stock Number System conversion was in full swing, it appears that in order to completely remove all traces of any of the older stencil information, the quick way was to paint this old information completely over on the front panel with a thick coat of tan/yellow paint, and apply the new NATO Stock Number data in black paint.

So the first line on the stencil in this photo is the NATO Stock Number equivalent of the wartime VAOS Stock Number ZA/CAN 4729. I have no idea what the remaining information means. This would have been the item description in the old VAOS System, but what I see here, suggests that if one needs to know what this item actually is, you need to look that information up somewhere else.

The last line, hand written in black felt marker would have been written on the case when the 52-Set equipment was finally surplussed out of the supply system in the early 1970’s, in the Canadian Army.



David