Show us your radios!

[vitanola]

My, a Radiola 30! That's a lovely set and I would say that the feeling of accomplishment in restoring this set to working order would be grand! I would like to see a photo or two of the chassis, to see how far gone it is.

There are radio clubs all over the US and many will be able to help in parts and such... you already have much help right here being offered!

Now, my opinion would be to refinish (respectfully) and use it as a conversation piece right now and keep your eye out for a working chassis or till time comes to piece one together. I think you would derive a large amount of satisfaction from just restoring the cabinet since these earlier radios do make nice furniture.

The priority to restoring an early radio like this to working order is low since AM is void of anything very enjoyable on the AM frequency. So, you wouldn't really enjoy the working set till you fashioned an AM transmitter to your PC to broadcast some period correct music to the set.

So, right now I'd say get that cabinet restored and display it with a nice cloth runner on the top and a few old photos in vintage frames from the 20s... that would be a nice addition I think till you can locate a working chassis or figure out how to get it working again.

Either that, or one could use the space occupied by the set to display a couple of refrigerators.

 

[David Conwill]

the chassis probably got tossed...I'm on the hunt for a chassis to put in it...

In the meantime, I see the perfect place to stash an amplifier and an XM receiver. Forties on Four, anyone?

-Dave

 

[LizzieMaine]

Been meaning to post this one for a while..

This is a RCA Victor 86K7, part of RCA's second-tier of console models for 1937 -- sold for $39.99, with a very basic standard broadcast/shortwave six-tube chassis and few frills, but a very impressive cabinet.

This radio was abandoned on my doorstep one night last winter -- literally. My landlord found it in a house he was helping to tear down over on the other side of town, and it was headed for the dump unless he took it. And suddenly it was on my doorstep. It was an awful looking thing, too, swathed in hideous late-sixties-style "antiquing paint," a precursor to the current shabby-chic fad. Whoever did the job was real thorough, too -- they not only painted the cabinet, they also swabbed the knobs and the Tenite plastic escutcheon with the same stuff, a shade I can only call "litter-box beige."

The chassis was complete, but the dial cable was broken and the tuning capacitor mechanism, an intricate geared arrangement, was seized up. And, the speaker was missing -- apparently the cone was torn out, and the frame had been thrown away before it could be rescued.

Miraculously, I found the exact speaker needed on eBay a few days after getting the radio, for a reasonable price, and it didn't take too much searching to find a dial belt and to get the mechanism freed up. A basic re-capping job, and the radio works fine.

The cabinet took some work, though. I soaked all the plastic parts in lacquer thinner to get the paint off -- I knew the knobs would be fine, but the escutcheon worried me, since Tenite is notorious for melting and distorting under all sorts of circumstances, so I was gentle with it and managed to get the paint off, revealing an elegant marbled-effect color underneath. And amazingly, the Tenite was not warped or damaged in any way -- whatever damage the previous owner inflicted on this set, at least they didn't put it in the attic, where the heat would have destroyed the plastic in a few years' time.

I took advantage of the first warm day of the spring to get the paint off, using a combination of stripper and lacquer thinner. The original finish was far gone under the paint, so I started over, using toning lacquer in the proper shades of medium walnut and Van Dyke brown, followed by clear satin lacquer for topcoats. And there it is.

I didn't really have room for another console, but I managed to find a spot in my office for it, and it's been getting a lot of use during the day. It was a decent radio for the money in 1937, and considering what it cost me, I think it's still a bargain.

 

[FountainPenGirl]

Hi Lizzie, That radio is nifty. I'm impressed. I haven't met a lot of other gals that are into radio. I professionally restore radios myself so I follow everything you mentioned doing. I got hooked on radio when I was very young and spent my whole life learning electronics and how to repair these great sets. When I was a kid there were plenty of great radios still around in peoples homes and I dreamed of having ones of my own to use. Fast forward to now and we have a house full of vintage radios we use all the time. I'm also a big fan of the Golden Age of Radio Broadcasting. Jack Benny, The Shadow and so on.

 

[Flivver]

Gee Lizzie, that's an awfully nice radio and a beautiful restoration job. I've worked with tinted lacquer and know how hard it is to get the toning just right. Looks like you've replicated the factory finish perfectly!

I have a lot of respect for RCA Victor radios of this era, having learned radio servicing on a 1938 RCA Victor 813K when I was a teenager. In my opinion, RCA combined the excellent performance of Philco with the quality of Atwater Kent.

 

[W4ASZ]

Practical Magic

I'm still admiring LizzieMaine's RCA. It's great to see a nice old radio brought back from the dead.

My older sets are never run at the house AC line voltage of 122 to 125 volts. Instead I use either a Variac or step-down isolation transformer to bring the source voltage to between 105 and 115 volts, tops. I noticed some years ago that I could not rest my hand on the top of the power transformer iof my 1934 Bosch 660 comfortably without backing the voltage down. (A rule of thumb , wink, nudge.) Let's keep the left hand in your pocket and check the temp with your right, to be safe. You could measure with a remote thermometer, but my way is more fun.

Reduce stress on those old components, I say. Yours, too !

 

[Forgotten Man]

Lizzie, youre RCA is beautiful! :eusa_clap Nice job! I love the dial on those mid to late 30s RCA's... just amazing designs!

 

[Jennifer Lynn]

Lizzie - I echo what others have said...wonderful looking radio and that is a great story of how you rescued it from an eternity of possible shabby chic-ness.

I'd happened upon a few stores at Renningers (half hour drive north of Orlando), and a fella told me he'd be bringing in a radio with turntable, and the way he described it is close to the size of yours. Wish I had the room for it.

I found a store that had vintage stereos, radios, television sets and all sorts of other electronic do-dads. The guy would restore them from the inside out, if needed. I walked in as he was fiddling with a circuit board. I ended up with this Howard model from the 40's:

Here are a few other pics of that particular store.

 

[Django]

Wow, lots of great radio pics since I last dropped in!

Just a quick update. After months and months of searching, I found the exact radio as my Grandma's Philco on ebay, so I bought it. Unfortunately for me, it too was a farm set with the battery, so it will cost an extra $75 to convert it. A friend's father is going to do the swap after he gets back from "vacation" in late August. I think I am going to cannabalize the larger speaker from the Coronado for a hopefully bigger sound.

I also dug my late '30s Silvertone tabletop radio out from storage and it still works great. I had been bugging my friend Matt to build a converter for iPod to home radios. He owns RediRad (http://www.rediscoverradio.com) and sells iPod converters for old cars. After 7 or 8 months of my pestering, one day he handed me the RediRad home version serial #0001. Awesome! It works great! I'm trying to talk him into introducing them into his product line because i think it is the best thing for an old radio... to get to hear the big bands the exact way my grandparents did is truly awesome. Once I get the Philco interals restored, and hook up the iPod, I will probably be beside myself! lol

 

[Jesse]

Thread bump....

Wish these were mine, operating as KH6BB on the USS Missouri

Ironically had a nice QSO with a Japanese station.

 

[Jesse]

Kenwood TS-520s

Heathkit SB-200

 

[jamespowers]

I forgot to mention that I got my Silvertone 4786 back from the repair shop a while back. It sounds great. The cabinet could use some work but man that radio can perform. The speaker is loud enough to be heard far into my backyard.
It kind of looks like this:

 

[Jesse]

I'd like to buy an old Zenith 12-S-267, not in the cards though right now :/

For now I have to stick to this:

Not vintage at all but I do like it

 

[Wire9Vintage]

We picked up this little beauty recently. It weighs a ton, needs work...and a speaker, but is such a piece of history. A Philco 511 from 1928:

A Google search found me some great info on this baby, but if anyone has any first-hand experience, I'd love to hear it. We foolishly plugged it in and had no explosion (or sound), but the tubes did glow, so there's a breath of life. Fortunately, I have a relative with extensive radio knowledge and access to piles of old radio bits and bobs. We'll see if that knowledge goes as far back as 1928, though!

 

[LizzieMaine]

We picked up this little beauty recently. It weighs a ton, needs work...and a speaker, but is such a piece of history. A Philco 511 from 1928:

A Google search found me some great info on this baby, but if anyone has any first-hand experience, I'd love to hear it. We foolishly plugged it in and had no explosion (or sound), but the tubes did glow, so there's a breath of life. Fortunately, I have a relative with extensive radio knowledge and access to piles of old radio bits and bobs. We'll see if that knowledge goes as far back as 1928, though!

I have one very similar to that out on my front porch -- it's a very basic early AC radio, and was, in fact, Philco's first model. The filter caps are large paper units mounted in those steel boxes, and they don't dry up like electrolytics, so they're likely to still be good. If you need to replace them, modern ones can be strapped in on the terminal board underneath -- you can open the cans, but you'll find the caps inside are potted with tar that can be very difficult and smelly to get out.

Do you have the speaker? It would be a large, heavy unit in a pot-metal cabinet, connected to the radio by a thick cable to that terminal board in the back. Without the speaker, obviously, you won't hear anything. You also seem to be missing a couple of tubes.

 

[Wire9Vintage]

Yes, there are missing tubes, and a mish-mash of one left in it. No, no speaker. There is a Philco 211 speaker to match on ebay right now, but is more than twice what we paid for the radio... so I'll keep looking. I imagine there's a match out there somewhere. The plan now is to rig up some kind of speaker.

Lizzie, you'll probably know this. There is what looks to be a head-phone jack on the front, to the left of the dial. Is that what that is? At first we thought there was a missing toggle switch, like the power switch on the right, but then thought it might be a jack. I'm communicating with my relative via skype and Web cam, so we were unable to come to a couple of conclusions on it, since he'd never seen a 1928 model!

Personally, I'm just as excited the original paint job is more or less in tact. These babies were hand painted, and while the 511 isn't as fancy as the 512s, etc. I love its beautiful self so much!

 

[LizzieMaine]

That jack is actually an auxiliary input -- Philco made a magnetic phonograph pickup unit that would plug into that jack, which feeds the signal into the detector tube. So, once you get it up and going, you could easily patch in a small pre-amp fed by an Ipod or other such device.

As far as the speaker goes, the original was a high-impedance magnetic type, so you wouldn't have to worry about a field coil. You would, however, need an impedance-matching transformer to use any kind of modern speaker as a temporary replacement. Info on how to rig this up is here.

 

[Wire9Vintage]

Lizzie, as usual, you are a wealth of knowledge. I'll pass all of this information on to my "radio man" (actually my father-in-law, who has been told to bring tubes and tools with him to Thanksgiving dinner). That is much more exciting on the jack, too. I have just the stuff on my ipod, too.

 

[38lasalle]

My "Daily Driver" Radio: Grunow Teledial

Here's a shot of the Grunow Teledial (12-B Chassis) that I completed restoring a couple of weeks ago. The electrics were in sad shape but the cabinet was ding-free and the grille cloth is original. Bought this set in late August of this year and spent 2/3 of September rebuilding the chassis and refinishing the cabinet. It works very well, rivaling my 12-S-265 Zenith in tone quality and sensitivity- and, yes, the AFC works perfectly.

 

[jamespowers]

Here's a shot of the Grunow Teledial (12-B Chassis) that I completed restoring a couple of weeks ago. The electrics were in sad shape but the cabinet was ding-free and the grille cloth is original. Bought this set in late August of this year and spent 2/3 of September rebuilding the chassis and refinishing the cabinet. It works very well, rivaling my 12-S-265 Zenith in tone quality and sensitivity- and, yes, the AFC works perfectly.

Wow! You did a great job there. :eusa_clap