V1.

Hello,

below i describe a 10€ Meter repair / exchange for the Multimeter of the Heathik SB 220 amplifier.

They seem to die pretty often in case of tube failure but are no longer available:

An original Heathkit Instument

With exchanged meter

It is quick and dirty and will take 30-60 Minutes to do. There are mechanically nicer ways to do it (by
extracting the meter from the plastic and drilling some nice holders, but i wanted to have a quick
solution).

The original Meter was already exchanged in my SB220 to something that did not fit at all electrically
by the previous owner, so I had to exchange it.

In the internet I could find that the Meter’s in a SB220 have 200uA full range and 2kOhm resistance.
Replacement:

I found this instrument on the internet, 100uA and 1kOhm Resistance

It is pretty common here in Europe and for example sold under the “Monacor” brand or in my case
“EDI- Tronic” for 9,99€

New Instrument for modification

The important thing is, that it has nearly the same screw spacing at the back as the original
instrument and can me cut down to completely fit inside the old Heathkit Intstrument !

Size of the new “donor” instrument:

60*46mm Front Frame

Depth 33mm

Mounting diameter 38mm

Process:

Original Multimeter:

- Unscrew the Cables from the Multimer back

- Detach the original cover from the Heathkit
- You can leave the instrument Body mounted in the SB 220 ! (no need to disassemble the
whole Front )
- Remove the old meter so that only the transparent housing remains inside the SB220
- Remove the meter scale carefully so that it is not breaking and gets no scratches !
Prepare new Multimeter:

Carefully remove the cover and the meter plate from the new instrument:

Then the “rude” part begins.

Be careful not to kill the instrument. Use a saw or small circular saw to cut the instrument down until
it looks like this: (mechanical engineers would kill me for this; if you have more time, do it nicer)

- Make also sure, that the plastic is completely flat on the front by removing all pieces for
lighting..
- Paint the pointer white ! (I used Acrylic Paint that i took from my daughters painting stuff)
- Insert the new instrument into the housing of the old. You will see that the wholes in the
back will precisely fit the screws.
-
- Make sure that the surface matches nicely inside:
- Put two washers on the back to match the surfaces on the front

- Now you can fix the screws at the back:

- Put CAREFULLY the original Meter plate behind the pointer and us a pen to mark the two
new holes you need to drill into the meter plate.
If you see already cracks in the meter plate then I recommend to reinforce it with tape on
the back first.

It should look like this after assembly:

A small drawback is, that the 0 alignment screw in the cover will not work after the modification
You need to pull the cover off for adjusting, but be careful just in case as you might high find high
voltage here in error cases !
 I did leave it as is electrically as it was precise enough for me with 1kOhm.

Proposal for electrical adaption to the original 200uA@2kOhm Instrument from Jeff Anderson:

Important:

Don’t forget to secure the meters against the fail by putting 2* 1N4001 antiparallel across the meter
input (same for the Plate Amp- Meter!)

Please put a fuse in the kV line to the Plates to save it from an even bigger damage !

73 from Germany

Detlef Wilke, DK3DE, December 2018