In fixing the DC/speaker protection relay in the Technics SA-929 receiver, I sorta-kinda broke it by getting too crazy with the relay while popping the cover. It didn’t require the amount of violence that most relays do (ten points for Matsushita!) but enough turned out to be too much for those solder joints. While in there, I also noticed a burnt out bulb and some curious wiring between the speaker connectors and power line. Now it looks and plays like new. The Sansui tuner (another find from the secondhand audio equipment sale) worked fine if you didn’t mind the vacuum fluorescent display flickering on and off. I fiddled with this first and fixed that problem by reconnecting all the tinned wires I could find. (Each of the tinned wires plugs into a plastic connector, something that also showed up in the Pioneer tape deck.) After that, the display was solid but a light bulb responsible for illuminating some buttons kept acting up. As it turned out, there was cracked solder on one of the bulb legs. Someone was in there before me, as several of the VFD pins had also been retouched.

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