Meersburg 125 Stereo

      Hello,
      recently I bought this radio for a very nice price - and it turn out to be a good deal, as condition was very good. I had to choose between Freiburg 7 and this, and as I have already Meersburg 8 which looks very similar, I decided to buy M125 - there is a few interesting things about it, mainly mono-stereo system and automatic buttons.
      Lucily all zink parts were in order - this is a buying nightmare for me. I always wonder, why such a complicated clutch system - in many radios this is much simpler and works just fine.
      Here's how the radio looked when I got it:



      Overall very good condition, alas one automatic button is cracked.
      Chassis was covered in thick layer of dust, so I decided to act thoroughly.



      After dismantling all transformers and engine, chassis went under shower and then quick drying (it was very very hot outside) - never had a problem with showering chassis and also this time it was successful.
      I'm not completely satisfied with cleaning of the cloth - I usually wash it in cold water, and it's fine, but here glue of those strips in front of the loudspeaker gave up :\ Nevertheless it's not so noticeable.

      I also refinished this metal around buttons with gold spray paint - I discovered that ordinary hair spray is doing good job in protecting those golden paints.


      Next I replaced paper capacitors, cleaned switches and then tried plug it on. It played good, but there was something wrong with voltages of both ECL86 - but replacing of both tubes helped.







      Then I noticed something strange in the automatic search - on some stations engine is very quickly rocking back and forth, signal strength doesn't matter.
      I enclose a video: http://youtu.be/2I3Iir9An1c
      I did a quick check of the automatic filter, but with slight corrections of coils there's zero current and voltage on strong station is ca 28V which is alright, but tuning is still rocking.
      1. Can it be that some stations have too much modulation which causes excessive movement of the engine (which is trying fast to tune to the exact position)?
      2. I noticed that automatic here works faster than in my M8 - here it takes 9 seconds from one end of the scale to another, in Meersburg 8 it is 15 seconds. Are those differences normal (maybe it's because of different motor capacitors)?

      This is how it looks like now (that button is unfortunately noticeable):



      Best regards,
      Piotr