Yes! most 20's stuff not popular here either unless it has Marconi on it.

Wont say what I paid for my 18 but I guess it was less than the shipping !

So you have to sell it with a period speaker as well ...

Wow! 10-20 dollars and don't go.

Gary

Yup. I have the correct horn speaker for it. If anyone gets this one it won't be for the beautiful sound quality: It sounds awful! I suppose its the whole curiosity of the thing.

I haven't worked on one of these in years but I think I have a little more respect for them. They are rather robust and for the time period quite reliable machines.

The latest from this past few days:
A small Telechron branded radio. I think this might be the only set that Telechron sold since they were more about providing clocks to other manufactures. Its a VERY basic TRF set with an amazingly small, 4 tube chassis.

I've restored around 4-5 of these and they're always a challenge since all of the components are really crammed in there. Plus since the old wax caps are piled on top of one another they tend to get stuck together requiring a screw driver to un-stick em'

Just finished this really nice Setchell Carlson amp. Its actually a Western Electric design but SC licensed it from Western Elec. Its a beefy thing using a set of matching 6L6's. I have it running through my RCA studio speaker now and it sounds really nice. I did have to make a base for it as well as sides so that whomever gets this won't stick their hands into the innards and get a nasty surprise.

Work resumes on a huge Grundig console. As some might have seen I had an issue with the original speakers. The surrounds were totally shot. The size of the speakers are 10.5" ( of course... its German so it HAD to be some obscure size that isn't at all industry standard ) and so no factory-made surrounds are available to replace them. I made a valiant effort to make my own surrounds but this failed.

The drastic solution, albeit kind of jerryrigged was to use 10" woofers instead. But as the holes and mounting bolts for the originals used the old speaker's baskets and this too was a weird size I wound up having to use a cutoff wheel to cut out all of the basket of the old speaker and retrofit this to the new 10" speaker. PrimitiveRadiogod gave me two older Advent woofers, which should sounds nice. The new speakers are bolted and glued to the old speaker bracket. I did one last night, the other will happen in the next day or two for installation on club day Saturday.

Should be an equitable solution!
Nice work!
Hope they sound great!

-Steve

Man I hope so... this console has been the biggest pain in the $%$%*(( thing to work on...

The other speaker was done last night. I realize others might have issues with these speakers so I took more photos to show how one can do this.

1: Cut out all of the old speaker cone.


2: Use a cutoff wheel and remove all of the rear portion of the cage. Hammer the remaining tabs down flat.


3: drill holes through the corners of the front of the cage in which to bolt the new speaker to it and then apply clear silicone glue before you press the two and bolt it all together

A few new jobs.

1: 1942 Philco. Initially the cabinet was covered in gooey filth. It was recapped and I tried the GOJO trick you guys had talked about. It worked really well! Underneath the grime the finish was actually in nearly perfect condition. After a recap it plays well.


2: 1957 Zenith hifi console.
This kind of stereo has become VERY popular. This one is probably a middle of the road unit, as in its not amazing but its decent. Whoever designed it wasn't thinking of the serviceman: The amp chassis is mounted BEHIND the tuner chassis meaning the tuner has to come out first and then the amp is bolted to the underside of the top and even getting that off was a royal pain.

Initially it was filthy.


The amp chassis was cake to rebuild. The tuner chassis only had a few electrolytics, the rest being orange drop or ceramic. It did have a sel. rectifier which was replaced with a diode to ensure the future owner doesn't get a stink bomb in their living room if it were to fail.


The record player had severely rotten idle wheels and motor mounts. Luckily a few weeks ago I found a big stash of record player parts and NOS rubber at the museum. I found the right ones and installed that, took apart, cleaned and oiled the motor, cleaned the changer mech, glued the rubber mat back to the platter. The filth covering the tuner and amp faceplates were cleaned up and polished with chrome wadding polish.


Bluetooth was added and the overal cabinet cleaned several times. I also stained a area where some veneer had come off in one of the corners after this image was taken.

Skyking,
I use Mothers wheel polish. Works great and gives a wonderful shine.

Jim

That "1957" Zenith console, is actually a 1962 - 1964 model. The tuner is a stereo FM multiplex, which was not available until 1961. also, the turntable has the 2.2 Mg "microtouch" tone arm, which Zenith did not have available until late 1962.

Thank you for the correction Robert. I didn't really do a lot of research but I'd assumed it was a 1957 model only because I saw "1957" stamped all over the chassis.

Yes, that amplifier was used in many of Zenith models as far back as 1957. they used that amplifier in many of their models up until 1964. the early versions had an additional 12AU7 as a driver stage, but later amplifiers did not have the 12AU7

Yesterday I completed this very large Grundig console.


This thing has been a major pain to restore. Its so large that I would take bits and pieces of the chassis and other stuff home to recap and work on and then on Saturdays try them out back in the cabinet. There is a amp and a tuner chassis, both your typical rat's nest, layered cobweb of wiring and components, some impossibly buried under other chunks of chassis. As seen in prior posts the original speakers were shot, an initial fix of the surrounds failed and thus new woofers were "grafted" on the back, cut-out frames of the old speaker baskets. And then at the end of it all one channel was not playing at the same volume as the other. MANY hours were spent delving into that before realizing I had mistaken one of the caps coming off of one of the channel's 12AX7's whereas the correct value was .047 and I'd installed a .47 instead. Once corrected the problem was solved.

Once all back together the new speakers are so amazingly robust that the cabinet would vibrate and creak. So I spent some time tightening all the cabinet's screws, filling joints with glue and then attaching some baffling material inside the speaker area. All of this got rid of the annoying sounds.


So now that its been overahauled there is about 6 weeks before the next sale. So I will be playing this one for extended periods of time to ensure that its reliable and working properly because getting a callback on this one would be a royal nightmare.

Amazing work Bob as usual. Thumbs up.

Its been sort of slow these days. Apparently a 50's Zenith console is incoming but I'll be on vacation starting next week.

Anyway, I did do this Emerson clock radio. It has a sort of crummy PCB board that seems to ever so slightly flex when the tuning knob is turned. So there were some shorts in the solder joints. After a recap and the resoldering of several bits it works fine.

This weekend's project was a early 40's Zenith with interesting "barber pole" design in the scrollwork. As typical of the era, lots and lots of crumbly rubber wiring, most that had to get replaced. This is not an easy set to work on as things are buried under stuff.



Added bluetooth as well.


One of our members was kind enough to touch up and clean the cabinet. Some veneer was glued down too.

Well, Its been a few weeks as we were away on vacation in Hawaii. While I was away a few donations came in and when I got back I was sort of hankerin' to work on something.

The first was a smallish console made by Olympia. Someone told me Olympia was just a holding company and they stuck their name on all sorts of stuff, contracting the work out to whomever. It still worked but of course the rubber grommets for the record player motor were all shot. I've found that ordinary modern grommets used for cords works pretty well as replacements. So those were replaced and the set recapped, cleaned up, etc. A bluetooth adapter was also added.







We also received a rather large Zenith stereo console.

You know how on occasion where a set turns your life into a temporary hell? That was this set. Maybe its because I'm still pretty tired and not back on California time but I made a few dumb mistakes that cost a lot of time.


Anyway... Initially the set did not work. The amp worked but no AM/FM reception. No pilot lights despite all of the bulbs being good, and this set uses 5-6 of them. Around 5 of the tubes tested very weak. One tube, a very unusual one called a 6EQ8 tested bad. So off to the museum to get replacements. The first 4 were easy to find. But the 6EQ8? Keep in mind our museum has untold billions of tubes but after digging for 2 hours I found none of these. I got home figured maybe... maybe I'd used the wrong settings on the tube tester for that tube. Yes- I did. Thus 2 hours wasted for nuttin'.

Now the second part of the issue:


I'd noticed that whoever had owned the set before had installed a 6EU7 in the 12AX7 socket. I figured well, that's probably a reason why its not working. Thus I installed the correct tube in the socket. I'll come back to that later.

Moving on, the tuner chassis and amp were recapped.


BTW, notice that the rectifier for the amp uses a big Compactron? Weird...


Despite that there were still issues. around 1/4 of the tubes in the tuner chassis had no filament, the pilot lights were still out and one of the green resistors seen in the right side of the tuner chassis was getting smoking hot. Something was shorting out 6 volt DC before the pilot lamps. So I traced that back to a tiny electrolytic that I'd somehow missed. That solved the issue but still- no sound. I could hear a very faint sound of an incoming signal.

Now... remember the label from earlier? Something got me to thinking: Why would a manufacture stick both a 12AU7 and a 12AX7 in something? They're both the same kind of tube and the 12AU7 is generally regarded as the precursor to 12AX7. So as a sort of last ditch attempt to answer the question, miraculously radiomuseum had the schematic. It turns out that the tag inside the set was WRONG... as in a mis-print. The correct tube was in fact a 6EU7. So with that replaced the set came alive again.



Literally a day wasted on two dumb mistakes. The good news is that despite the set's kind of ugly colonial styling it sounds really nice and the AM/FM is very sensitive.

The record player in this unit is actually belt driven, which I haven't ever seen in an American 50's console before. Its a few notches above your standard VM machine. The belt was amazingly still in very good shape. So after some cleaning and re-assembly it all went back together and works smoothly. I installed a new needle too.



Bluetooth was added. I find its best to install these as far from any chassis as possible to avoid noise from the USB power supply. See it in the below pic: its the small red thing.


And so now its all done. Actually it sounds REALLY nice for what it is.

The yesterday and the night before was spent on this Telefunken " Rondo". Love the name as it sounds like a sort of 50's Western. Anyway it worked when it was donated by one of our members ( Thanks! ) and its amazing it did since the electrolytic can up top had some nice white stuff spewing out of it. Not that difficult of a set to recap as many were mylar and thus fine to leave alone. Installed bluetooth and she's good to go.