Vintage Radio Services

This set arrived from a friend, it’s in quite good condition. On initial inspection things looked very clean. The usual method of testing an restoring the power supply. Cleaned up the chassis, downloaded the service manual and ordered some electrolytics for the power supply, these took quite a while to arrive. There must me a shortage of these 32uf-32uf components! Finally, after waiting a couple of weeks for the PSU capacitor to turn up, I was able to work through the set. I already had all the other capacitors in […]

This Philco is a small cheap table top radio. It’s very simple in design, has quite a low component count and actually works really well. The only down-side to it’s design is that it uses a dropper-resistor to step down mains voltage to power the heaters in the valves. This is really inefficient, of the 43 Watts consumed by the radio, about 30 is burned up in that resistor! I guess it doubles as a nice personal heater for those cold winter nights! The cabinet wasn’t too bad, just needed […]

Roberts Radio was a very successful manufacturer of portable radios in the UK. This RT1 was their first ever transistorised model, from 1958. I was fortunate to find this one on an auction site for small money but it needed a lot of love, missing strap, broken logo, terrible knobs, broken clasp and really really grubby leather. On the up side, the electronics seemed to look nice an clean, with only moderate damage to the aerial coil. These early transistor sets have quite rare and delicate components that can be […]

This is an old cabinet speaker dating from the 1920s. I was unable to find any details about it on the internet, other than a similar looking Model 140, dated 1929. It took a while to get the cabinet open as storage and time had rusted some of the screws. Stress on the front and back panels also caused the plywood to delaminate! On investigating, there was an internal transformer (high impedance to low) and a smaller than standard vintage speaker driver that had been fitted. The transformer had been […]

I was never really happy with the appearance of the 471, after spending only minimal time on the cabinet. So, the other day I decided to strip it down and do some work on it. The other things I want to do, re-wire the speaker connector and investigate why the volume output is so low. Update on this, I’ve managed to redo the speaker wiring and also found some small problems around the amplifier section (EL33 valve) I had substituted a 0.1uF cap in place of the old 0.2uF. Fixed […]

This is one of the first portable transistor radios ever. Although it isn’t a valve set, it’s quite an attractive little thing and I’d promised to restore it for a friend. On inspection I found that the mechanical tuning dial arrangement of pulleys spindles and tension chord had come apart, this was fixed first. Secondly, it appeared that all of the transistor legs had corroded away, so I was faced with finding the following equivalents:- V6/R4M (OC44)V6/R2 (OC45)V6/R2 (OC45)V10/50B (OC71)V10/50B (OC72)V10/50B (OC72) I have found some near replacements on eBay […]

Whilst looking around for a 1920s style radio, I found this old thing on eBay. It looked nothing like a commercial set, using rigid interconnecting wires and screw terminals between internal components. I was captivated by the simplicity of it. As is was missing a critical component, the tuning capacitor, it wasn’t very expensive so I bought it immediately. It sat on my shelf for nearly a year before I had the time to concentrate on it. Recently, with a virus caused lock-down in place, I took it down from […]

This cute little set was given to me to restore for a friend, it’s a 5 valve superheterodyne and is mains powered. It is literally the most compact mains valve set I’ve ever seen and very light too. As I understand it, this kind of set would have seen used in the bedside table. There were many variations of this set over the years, it first came out just before the war and finished in the early 1950s. The tricky thing was determining which variation it was.As it turned out, […]

This little 1938 radio came to me in a small collection that were left in a basement for many years, then a loft space. Those conditions had quite a negative effect on the metalwork of the chassis but happily not insurmountable and the cabinet was in quite good condition to begin with. The 808 is known as a ‘transportable’ as it was easily moved using it’s carry handle, but more impressively included a built in aerial. It’s construction is quite unusual, in that the chassis is a mixture of hardwood […]

Here’s a quick post about the other day, fiddling with my 1930 homebuild radio.A couple of things happened:- 1 I was able to get it to work much better after modifying it’s circuit a little bit with a different grid leak resistor arrangement.2 After returning from a nice walk with the better half, I’d discovered that the radio barely worked at all with virtually no volume. I was quite miffed at 2, and spent much of the remaining day debugging it. It all turned out to be caused by corroded […]