Power Designs 6010D Universal DC Source Restoration

Restoring a Power Designs Inc. 6010D pow­er supply

I usu­al­ly keep an eye out for for Power Designs Inc. pow­er sup­plies that are in need of some repair and some TLC, and I hap­pened across a PD 6010D unit up for auc­tion. Luckily I was the only bid­der and pur­chased it for slight­ly more than the ship­ping cost.
It was a fair­ly sad look­ing unit with a lot of orange/brown tint­ed grime every­where, along with some spi­der webs, stick­ers, and stick­er residue every­where. The sup­ply was adver­tised as ” Unit does need sev­er­al min­utes to arm up but appears to be functioning”.

After receiv­ing the pow­er sup­ply, I checked it for ship­ping dam­age. Surprisingly it was intact, even thou it only had a few lay­ers of loose bub­ble wrap, and a few pieces of air filled plas­tic pouch­es in the box. The auc­tion pho­tos did­n’t do jus­tice to how incred­i­bly grime coat­ed it actu­al­ly was.
I was some­what tempt­ed to try and pow­er up the sup­ply, but after the rough ship­ping com­mon sense pre­vailed and I did a prop­er inspec­tion first.
First checks were the pow­er cord and fuse. I then checked the trans­form­ers pri­ma­ry wind­ing thru the pow­er cord, and it’s iso­la­tion from ground. The trans­former’s pri­ma­ry wind­ing resis­tance was 6.1 Ohms and greater than 1 GOhm resis­tance to ground, so far so good. I then took the cov­er off to check inside the unit.

The good news is that I did­n’t find any­thing loose or dam­aged inside the case. Not real­ly any bad news as I some­what expect­ed to find some dust and grime inside the case, just a bit more than I thought with some trails of gunk where liq­uid had dripped or splat­tered inside.
The areas where splat­ter and drips were bridg­ing across traces may have some­thing to do with the “slow warm up” auc­tion descrip­tion. Time to start cleaning.

After check­ing the main board capac­i­tors with my PEAK atlas ESR+ capac­i­tor tester, and find­ing that the exist­ing capac­i­tors were at the low­er end of their tol­er­ance rat­ing I decid­ed to replace them. I went with Vishay long-life series capac­i­tors rat­ed for 10000 Hrs @ 105°C. I also added a small square of some 20 mil thick FR4 sheet under the 2,200 uF capac­i­tors for some extra iso­la­tion.
I dis­as­sem­bled the front meter, and removed the red bezel which was sit­ting at an odd angle in the cutout. The odd bezel angle was due to how the bezel was not orig­i­nal­ly machined at the prop­er angle. After remov­ing most of the scratch­es on the bezel with Novus plas­tic pol­ish, I was able to reassem­ble the dis­play and bezel with some plas­tic shims to even it out.

So far I haven’t been able to find any doc­u­men­ta­tion on the PD 6010 series of pow­er sup­plies. The PD 6010D has a near­ly iden­ti­cal front pan­el com­pared to the PD 6050D with the excep­tion of the print­ed “Regulated Range” val­ues and mod­el num­ber. The back pan­els are also sim­i­lar with some dif­fer­ences in label­ing. The case length of the PD 6050D is 12″ (305mm), and the PD 6010D length is 9.2″ (234mm). Externally those are the only obvi­ous dif­fer­ences between the two mod­els.
The 6050D inter­nal lay­out is quite a bit dif­fer­ent, with many com­po­nents mount­ed off of the main board.
I was able to find out which trim poten­tiome­ters were used for the front pan­el meter cal­i­bra­tion by trac­ing their con­nec­tions and com­par­ing it to the 6050D schemat­ic.
R53 is the meter cur­rent cal­i­bra­tion which is adjust­ed at full out­put cur­rent (1.5 Amps). And R54 is for cal­i­brat­ing the full scale meter volt­age which is 60 volts on the 6010D.

I have a future meter replace­ment project in the works for both the 6010D and 6050D sup­plies so know­ing loca­tion of the cal­i­bra­tion pots will be impor­tant for that project.

After reassem­bling the unit and com­plet­ing some per­for­mance test­ing, I start­ed on clean­ing the out­side case and front pan­el. The stick­ers and adhe­sive residue came off fair­ly easy, and left rec­tan­gu­lar areas of clean anodized alu­minum and paint. I do not know what this unit was coat­ed with, pos­si­bly some type of lac­quer or resin, but It took me around 6 hours to final­ly get it clean enough to meet my stan­dards. The good news is that what­ev­er type of grime that was on it did an excel­lent job of pro­tect­ing the sur­face under­neath it.

After cal­i­brat­ing the front meter and per­for­mance test­ing all three of the out­put ranges, I was very impressed with this low­er wattage ver­sion of the 6050D. As usu­al the rip­ple volt­age on all three ranges at full cur­rent was almost non-exis­tent, and set out­put volt­ages were extreme­ly sta­ble over vary­ing load conditions.

I am still won­der­ing why this mod­el was­n’t brand­ed with a 6015D mod­el num­ber since it’s max­i­mum out­put is 60 Volts at 1.5 Amps. That would have matched the ongo­ing mod­el num­ber struc­ture.
I have also been curi­ous if the PD 5015D pow­er sup­ply’s inter­nal board and schemat­ics are a close match with the 6010D’s?

Parts are on order for the upcom­ing meter upgrade, so I will be revis­it­ing this unit hope­ful­ly in the near future.