RCA Victor 45-EY-3 vintage record player

On the workbench for some troubleshooting is a 1950s era vintage RCA Victor 45-EY-3 record player. It belongs to someone in my neighbourhood and came to me via a referral from a neighbour who’s familiar with my penchant for tinkering with electronics.

The owner purchased this recently and had already replaced the tubes, capacitors, a few resistors and some of the mechanical bits before the record player landed on my bench. He said it was sort of working (some mechanical issues with the arm moving), but then stopped turning on. Fortunately, he had a printouts of the service documentation available to look over. On the electronics side, the circuitry is pretty simple consisting of three tubes: rectifier (35W4), amplifier (12AV6), and output (50C5).

After touching up a few solder joints, I found the power switch was kind of dodgy and would work if I tilted it a certain way. I also realigned the muting switch (S2) so that it was oriented the same way as one of the photos in the service manual. That got me to the point where records could play and sound came out of the speaker instead of just resonating through the needle arm. The sound volume was pretty low though, even with the volume pot turned up all the way and there’s also a lot of hum getting into the electronics too. Those are the two main things I need to work on, and the owner will work on the mechanical stuff.