The Rock-Ola is Cleaned Up Now!

It's exciting that I have managed to clean up my Rock-Ola. After replacing a few obvious problem components and lubricating some easy to access mechanics, the machine seems to be in amazing working order.

I put some good favourite tunes into it and we set it up in our front office. So, intimate enough that if you turn it down, you can privately enjoy some tunes or that it can also be loud enough to be heard across the main floor of the house.

I think that in the not too distant future, I will actually strip the machine right down to be repainted and to grease and oil even the things I didn't get the first time. But for now, it's working really good so I will just let the family enjoy it for a while.

A good friend of mine has been coaxing me to make some offers on more machines that have been appearing online so I can start restoring them and flipping them. He is interested in being a silent partner, so to speak, and to help me out financially if I am serious about making this kind of thing into a more professional hobby. It's something I have to think about as I don't really have the best facilities to work on these things or to store them. My basement is ideal and where my main workshop is, but hauling those machines up and down the stairs could be asking for disaster.

I do have a garage, mind you, but it is small and not exactly secure. I will have to think on the idea a bit more. My heart tells me 'Yes' but my brain tells me to keep my feet on the ground.

The Parts Are Rolling in for the Rock-Ola

I had to order many of my new components through eBay, mostly because I found that the local electronics suppliers charge way too much for small parts in some cases. I'd love to buy locally instead of overseas, but I blame that on the local merchants. I have to wait a lot longer for things to arrive, but the time I wait patiently for parts still pays off in the long run.

Anyway, this was not a rant about economics so I will move on. I replaced the obvious parts in the power supply and was able to put it back in the Rock-Ola. I suspect that the caps I replaced there will affect the bad humming sound I was getting whenever the audio kicked in to play a record. I also recapped about half of the amplifier, again only replacing the visually obvious parts first. I did poke around and test other components and really only found a bad diode otherwise that may also contribute to the hum probably I was noticing.

So, the unit powers up again with no issues but part of the electronic selector circuits are still located in the amplifier that I haven't put back in yet. I greased or oiled as many mechanical parts as I could and those parts are moving much smoother. I even solved a record retrieval issue the unit was having just by updating the grease.

So hopefully I get the last of my parts this week and can put this machine back together. And if I am satisfied with the audio quality and overall performance of the machine, then I will look at the cosmetic issues like chipped paint, scratches and such.

But so far, so good. This is very exciting!

Can You Call It Furniture? A Rock-Ola Restore!

I haven't posted anything on here in a while. So, since I am currently very pre-occupied with my latest acquisition, I am going to count it as a blog topic.

I picked up this 1981 Rock-Ola Jukebox (Model 484) from a guy on Kijiji who had it for sale for $200 and said that it was in working order. So, the evening of New Year's Eve 2014, I travelled across Edmonton to get a look at it and see if it was going to be a worthwhile investment. Sure enough, the previous owner powered it up and demonstrated that it was working.

He had originally picked it up through a liquidation sale of an old business (bar) with the hopes of having the time and the energy to fix it up himself. Instead, it was sitting in his dining-room where his family should have been eating. So, I decided to buy it.

The irony of this was, it wound up sitting in my dining-room for about a week before I found a better home for it. I was pretty quick to get it open and start poking through it to see what needed to be done. It was really dirty and smelled like a cigarette which isn't that surprising if it sat in a bar for 20 years. I noted that the flourescent tubes were due for replacement, it was full of badly worn country music 45's but I left them in there for testing purposes. It definitely needed some new lubrication, a few minor alignment adjustments and the left channel was not working. It has LED digital displays on it and they seemed to suffer from a weird flicker pattern. I took a guess that this was probably going to need further investigation.

As I had expected, I pulled a few of the modules out of it (yes, everything is in modules for easy repair - amplifier, coin selector, record selector and so forth) and found a number of bad capacitors and one darkened circuit board, due to overheating. I was not at all surprised at the capacitors. I was glad that the record stylus was still in great condition and all of the mechanisms are still functioning.

So, currently, it is partially sitting in my living-room (the hull) and other components are down on my work bench awaiting ordered replacement parts. So far, replacement parts are going to cost me around $60.00 including shipping and a few hours of my time. Most of the issues were located in the amplifier and power supply modules, nothing in the computers and digital parts. I did find decent prices on whole modules available on various Jukebox parts resellers, but many of those parts are almost as used as the ones I have and will probably need the exact same work anyway.

The photo with the orange capacitor shows you what condition many of them were in. There is a little bit of tar popping out of the right side of this one. The fix? About $3.00.

I figure this entire restoration may cost me no more than $100 on top of what I have already paid for the machine. I would say that this will be worth the time and labour, especially when I can sit back and enjoy my handiwork.

I haven't decided yet if I plan to flip it after I am done restoring it? It would be awesome to find another one that is just a bit nicer and do this all over again until I work my way up to one of those nice old Chrome jobbies from the 50's or 60's. Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves, I guess.