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CB Repair Parts

T

Trillo5

New Member
Sep 2, 2023
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Hello Everyone,

I have been a lurker for a long time and have finally decided to participate. I'm getting to retirement age and looking for a small business to run part time. I have a few years left at my current position, but I would like to start something prior to full retirement. I have a background in electronics and most of the basic test equipment needed on my my bench for CB repair. I live in the Nashville, TN area and I see a huge need for basic repairs in my area. I have been doing some research and I'm trying to locate a distributor for parts specific to certain brands of Ham and CB equipment on a wholesale level. I have found several radio wholesalers, but I have failed to find a parts distributor for the industry in general? Yes, being a ham I do know about Kens and RF Parts Company, but they appear to be more retail. So where do these repair shops get most of their normal stocking items? I have a source for electronic components through current employment, plus I bet I have an assortment of individual components and failed RF equipment in my storage that would be enough to last me a lifetime.(At least my wife thinks so anyway:LOL:) Any help would be appreciated . Thank You in advance.

P.S. I'm currently looking for a Omron MX3P-12VDC relay for an old president, This part has been discontinued and the eBay seller that had some close replacements ( MX3P-US-DC14) has dried up. I have found another relay that will work, but I will need to do some rewiring and replace the socket on the PCB to make it look neat.........trying to avoid that if at all possible.
 

Trillo5 said:
Hello Everyone,

I have been a lurker for a long time and have finally decided to participate. I'm getting to retirement age and looking for a small business to run part time. I have a few years left at my current position, but I would like to start something prior to full retirement. I have a background in electronics and most of the basic test equipment needed on my my bench for CB repair. I live in the Nashville, TN area and I see a huge need for basic repairs in my area. I have been doing some research and I'm trying to locate a distributor for parts specific to certain brands of Ham and CB equipment on a wholesale level. I have found several radio wholesalers, but I have failed to find a parts distributor for the industry in general? Yes, being a ham I do know about Kens and RF Parts Company, but they appear to be more retail. So where do these repair shops get most of their normal stocking items? I have a source for electronic components through current employment, plus I bet I have an assortment of individual components and failed RF equipment in my storage that would be enough to last me a lifetime.(At least my wife thinks so anyway:LOL:) Any help would be appreciated . Thank You in advance.

P.S. I'm currently looking for a Omron MX3P-12VDC relay for an old president, This part has been discontinued and the eBay seller that had some close replacements ( MX3P-US-DC14) has dried up. I have found another relay that will work, but I will need to do some rewiring and replace the socket on the PCB to make it look neat.........trying to avoid that if at all possible.
Click to expand...
Your plan sounds great and more repair shops are definitely needed in this hobby. Hack shops are all over the place but true repair shops are not so best wished in your endeavor.
As to parts, in the game of cb/export parts it's not about what you know but instead about who you know. Some of the wholesalers have or can get parts depending on their relationship with the oem such as ranger, cobra, uniden etc. But the days of wide availability are thin, nowhere as it was a decade or 2 back.
Barkett knows people, he's been in the game since people saw in black and white so he's a better source for cb/export parts than rf parts or others. Many of us have acquired surplus parts through acquisitions of old shops and lots of oos radios but big availability today isn't so easy. Matter of fact, the oems (even ranger) no longer want to easily give up so much as a schemo, much less parts. Greg Barkett has gotten me out of some jams, he was the first to bring in the rt1 a few years back while everyone else had no idea what it even was.

I'm sure the wwdx greats can chime in with their thoughts.

Keep us posted!
 
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Eldorado828 said:
Your plan sounds great and more repair shops are definitely needed in this hobby. Hack shops are all over the place but true repair shops are not so best wished in your endeavor.
As to parts, in the game of cb/export parts it's not about what you know but instead about who you know. Some of the wholesalers have or can get parts depending on their relationship with the oem such as ranger, cobra, uniden etc. But the days of wide availability are thin, nowhere as it was a decade or 2 back.
Barkett knows people, he's been in the game since people saw in black and white so he's a better source for cb/export parts than rf parts or others. Many of us have acquired surplus parts through acquisitions of old shops and lots of oos radios but big availability today isn't so easy. Matter of fact, the oems (even ranger) no longer want to easily give up so much as a schemo, much less parts. Greg Barkett has gotten me out of some jams, he was the first to bring in the rt1 a few years back while everyone else had no idea what it even was.

I'm sure the wwdx greats can chime in with their thoughts.

Keep us posted!
Click to expand...
Thank you so much for the encouraging message. I have dipped my toe in the water a bit, to see what I'm up against. I'm currently restoring a early President Washington, unmolested radio in perfect condition. I'm just attempting to keep everything original as possible. After 10 plus radios, I see alot of antenna problems and brand new radios they say are off frequency. They all have been ordered online and I check the frequency and most are dead on, but they have all these strange wires grounding out circuits or components clipped or removed. Years ago when I worked on RF equipment, it was mostly tracing down components whos values had changed due to use or high heat environments, but this a whole new game. I have even invested in a microscope to repair these surface mounted parts they have clipped or globed up with solder. Its looks like I might also have to invest in some new technology circuit board repair tools to fix these modified (use that term loosely) boards. I just returned a Stryker 955 that the customer paid over $1000 ($400 on Amazon) for and it sounded awful. It was way out of spec and they had installed an echo board and only connected one wire and tucked the others up under the circuit board........remember Stryker 955's come with an echo board installed?? Left me scratching my head? So needless to stay I haven't really gotten a radio that required a true diagnosis, but hopefully I will start to see some consistency.

P,S I have my first part in stock, its a brand new Galaxy Echo board.....barely used.
 
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Good luck in your new endeavour ! As you get into repairing CB radios you will certainly see plenty of shocking and unbelievable things done to circuit boards. Be very cautious of anything that has been "peaked and tuned". There are tons and tons of so called "techs" out there who are completely clueless and who have taken the whole golden screwdriver thing to the next level. Sometimes it's more like a golden axe. As well, with many of the more recent radios with SMT components, botching the circuit board has been replaced with screwing around in the service menu, often with scary results. Have fun !
 
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Trillo5 said:
I will start to see some consistency.
Click to expand...
Yes. In the form of brain-dead efforts like adding an echo board to a radio with built-in factory echo.

You'll discover that parts are both a troubleshooting tool and a repair tool. Some parts can only be tested by substitution, and a repair can only be done with the needed part. That makes it a labor-selling tool.

I have acquired various rare parts over the years. Someone will ask "Do you have a relay for a RatShack TRC-458?". I'll reply that if I did I would lie and say "NO". A rare part that fails routinely is worth the total ticket of a repair it allows you to do. Looking under rocks on fleabay proves rewarding from time to time. Is it worth the wasted effort when you can't find what you need? Hard to tell.

You'll find moving parts, like volume controls or channel selectors that get smashed with someone's knee are an aggravation, since the size and shape matter as much as the resistance rating.

There is a business-school thing that compares the amount it took to purchase your sales stock to how much of it you sell in a year. I think they call it "velocity". Maybe.

But this kind of repair work reveals incredibly low-velocity items you'll really need, like common value resistors and capacitors. Both because they may fail, or become "sideswiped" by a surge from some other circuit failure. You may only sell one 100-ohm quarter-Watt resistor a month, but when you need it you really need it. In the late 1970s one local electronics parts supplier had a delivery truck and regular route. We could order two or three of a particular resistor, along with whatever else that week and not have to stock nearly as much. The sales companies that catered to the TV repair shops are gone along with the TV repair guys.

Other stuff like RF final-amplifier transistors that are failure prone are an ever-present challenge. Since original sources of parts for old equipment have closed up and moved on long ago, tracking down what you need becomes a bigger part of the job every year as time goes by.

Kinda like the rest of the world. The only constant is change.

73
 
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nomadradio said:
goes by.

Kinda like the rest of the world. The only constant is change.

73
Click to expand...
Thank you for replying, I sense you have been at this game a long time. I think what really is perplexing me, is all these strange modifications that shops are charging a fortune for. Most of these modifications actually cause incredibly poor modulation and frequency instability. I may not totally understand their theory or purpose, but I have just restored them to factory and provide a good peak and tune and everyone seems satisfied. It has me wondering if most of these radios are just fine right out of the box? I'm also seeing finals on brand new radios swapped out to other values, I can only assume they are attempting to improve the reliability, but based on the circuitry, in the few radios I have worked on I see very little need for this modification as nothing seems to be straining.
 
Thank you all for your help and insight. I'm going start tracking some none working radios on eBay to add to my parts inventory.......but at this stage its too early to know what exactly is of value until I see a little more volume. I had a suggestion to start looking for a Sencore Model CB-42 CB Analyzer, but I have a tone generator, frequency counter, VNA and an oscilloscope so really don't see the value. I guess I need to do some more research on this tool and capabilities.
 
It's incredibly useful to have a source of RF signal with a calibrated output level. Seeing what a receiver does with one microVolt is essential. And if you can't present 50uV (or 100?) to the receiver, you can't set the trimpot for a S9 signal on the radio's meter. And if the source frequency is highly accurate, it simplifies setting radios on proper channel frequency.

IIRC the CB42 will do this, but the VNA won't, don't think.

73
 
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