zenith: Zenith 5R 216 dial cord

I had a mouse chew my 5R 216 Zenth's dial cord.  I've never changed one of these model's dial cords before so was surprised how it is buried behind a dail housing of sorts.  Is there a trick to opening this housing up to access the pulley housed in there?  I tried taking the housing apart...removing the glass and the lamps, but the dial pointer won't pull off...it's very thin and delicate feeling and I'm afraid I'll break it!  I can carefully lift corners of the printed dial paper and roughly see behind it, but I'm sure that's not a good way to try and fish dial cord behind it.

Also - is there a diagram anywhere for the layout of that dial cord???

Wish I could find a you tube video of this issue!

Thank you for any help out there!

...Bruce Morrison

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Update the next day on my dial cord question.

I received a bit of coaching help from Rick Washburne on this.  We coaxed the dial pointer off the tuning shaft with a drop of penetrating oil.  I first tried to pull it off via a dial string lasso  - pulling straight from the front, but the collar on the pointer was stuck after 88 years!  I carefully lifted the edge of the printed dial plate and put a drop onto the base of the pointer's shaft.  Then reached in carefully with a plastic tool  and pushed againt the shaft as I pulled from the front - it came right off, so we now had the dial housing opened and exposed the dial string pulley.

We could not locate any dial cord diagram after a couple hours of searching between the two of us - but it was very straight forward.

There is just one large main pulley in the dial housing.

I tied onto the spring on the main pulley and up through the main pulley hole - wrapped the string around the pulley completely - then down to and around the tuning knob shaft 3 times - then back up around the main pulley and down through the hole and tied off again on the spring.  (keeping some tension on the spring the entire time.)

Worked perfectly.  Back in business!

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