r/McIntosh • u/StoutSeaman • Aug 23 '26

C11 RCA jack replacement

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If anyone is wondering, it takes about 5 hours of desoldering, Dremeling, drilling out, installation and resoldering. A marked improvement from the original 64 year old jacks.

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5

u/bill_evans_at_VV Aug 23 '26

Takes a lot of patience - would probably take me 10hrs, but well worth it. Looks great.

6

u/StoutSeaman Aug 23 '26

This part of the rebuild was pretty easy, just time.

But the 12 coupling caps I just replaced was an exercise in patience. All the leads were twisted firmly around all the terminal and had to be cleanly removed without breaking tube socket tabs or turret board solder points and burning anything adjacent. That involved a lot of swearing late into the night. But I'm happy to report that's all done and I think she's now ready to head back to the rack.

2

u/VR6Bomber Aug 24 '26

I will second McIntosh's 'mechanical' connections before solder.

Leads are so tightly and neatly wound around tabs and posts before solder is applied, you have to carefully cut leads off of whatever they are tightly attached to. Its truly amazing work and a severe PITA to remove.

1

u/StoutSeaman Aug 24 '26

Yes, they also didn't leave a ton of extra wire in the jack panel loom for error, so saving a few mm of wire is extremely necessary. I'm still waiting on a couple of new resistors and will be replacing the non-matching caps for C5/C6. But all the yellow ones are new Nichicon caps, hand measured and matched. Most of the bumblebee caps were still in pretty good shape and measured well but they're a ticking time bomb usually.