Stancor FYI

[selloutrr]

I contacted stancor regarding replacing transformer leads on the A-3801. Since most that surface has been hacked up and or the color coding is no longer discernable due to color fading.

The official answer is "due to the part being discontinued and no information available on the product we fo not offer service."

well now we know.

[Cliff Schecht]

I always just Ohm out the leads and figure out what is where. On the primary side, you're ohming it out to find the highest resistance between the three leads, those are your pin 3 connections to the power tubes. On the secondary side, you have to Ohm out the leads until you find the lowest resistance between any two, which will be ground and 4 Ohms. You could get a faulty reading between 4 and 8 Ohms but this will become immediately obvious when you go to find the 8 and 16 Ohm taps but you are getting strange readings (very high because you're actually finding the 250 and 500 taps). Mind you that the Stancor also has 250 and 500 ohm windings so the resistance just between these will be large.

Actually getting those windings apart and adding on new wires is quite a chore in itself because of how hard the paper usually is. There are probably ways of actually releasing the paper without breaking or tearing it but I've never needed to do this.