WelcomeUser Guide
ToSPrivacyCanary
DonateBugsLicense

©2024 Poal.co

788

It was $25,a super deal.

It was $25,a super deal.
[–] 1 pt

That one's a lot more complex than most radios of the time, and it's going to require someone with know-how to physically touch it to try and fix it.

I kid of felt the same way when I last checked it 30 years ago. When I was a child my grandmother would have her local AM station talk radio or music playing in her dining room. I remember her always baking cookies and other goodies to eat when I was there. We had Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners there too. She sold her house and moved to an assisted living facility 50 years ago, I think the radio worked at that time, my Dad and I cleaned out her house, and now I have all that stuff. I'd love to hear the radio play again, but if it costs more than a few hundred to fix, I doubt I'd do it. I should be unloading my treasures, I'm getting older, have no kids or living family, don't want to leave a mess of stuff for cousins or their kids to have to clean up.

[–] 1 pt

If you could do it yourself, chances are it could be made to play again - at least on AM - fairly easily.

Those skills are few and far between outside DIY...

[–] 1 pt

I could disassemble, clean all contacts, replace burnt/bad resistors, check wires, resolder broken joints but will have to pick up a new multimeter, my old one died years ago. From then on, it's up to how well I can follow those directions. I don't have power supplies, scope or any sort of test bench.

Then, after all that, I plug it into the wall and <poof>.

[–] 1 pt

If you do want to give it a shot, I'd say start with those capacitors in section 1 - those are probably all bad at this point. Make sure the inductor in that section is good, that's the field coil for the speaker and you won't get sound without that - it's also part of the power supply filter. If any of those are shorted, you'll know it and you could damage a lot more stuff.

You're working with a parallel filament string, so you can unplug a lot of tubes without killing the entire set.

Any capacitor in the set, especially those old wax coated ones, are probably bad and letting them leak will destroy tubes. Resistors aren't necessarily bad when way out of tolerance, but they can make for terrible performance. Any resistor coated with sand or multi-taps are immediately suspect.

You'll also need to take into account that device probably ran on 110, and we typically see 125 today.

Other than that, if you can separate the AM and FM sections, it may be easier to get just AM working since it's a fairly simple system. FM has the ratio detector and can be picky in older sets.