It's the first day of summer, but you wouldn't think so. Snow down to 850 metres, 50 mm of rain here in the past few days. 12C top temperature. As I look out of the window there is thick high cloud, fast moving middle level cloud, and low cloud. A very strange combination that makes the sky look grey. In the next few day's it's warming up to 30C, so who knows.
Anyway, over the past week or so a number of radios have been worked on.
The first was the Philips B3X75U. This looked like junk when I made the 1 second decision to buy it, when no else did. It was cheap. I discovered later it was missing an IF can and speaker. The main dropping resistor was open. Speaker out of an AWA B15, new resistors, an IF can from a Philips MM1, a lot of cleaning, and it is a great sensitive radio. Now all that's is needed is the two inner knobs. See YouTube.
The second radio is an Astor Mickey KL. This is serial number 242, so is very early in the production run. It and a couple of other Mickey's need the first two valves which are hard to get. The chassis is fine. The cabinet is something different. Again I bought it cheap because no one else bid. It had been painted, badly. I started stripping the paint and below the hand painted rubbish was another factory layer. This proved harder to remove. Below that was pristine Bakelite. Unfortunately, it was blemished in manufacture, hence the paint. I didn't know that they had been painted at the factory, perhaps the KL was only available in the two finishes and the KM started the colours. I now have 5 of the 11 colours!
The final completed radio is a huge AWA seven bander. This radio was free in Bendigo some five years ago, the catch was it was in bit's. The wooden cabinet had been sanded back, so last year I started to refinish it with Shellac. It has come up reasonably well, but some of the veneer has been over sanded through. I have partially recapped it, and now works superbly on MW. There's no short wave left here except Radio New Zealand and the Chinese, so I haven't aligned the SW bands.
It had a dead magic eye. So I've had to change the socket from a 6 pin to an Octal. There was conflicting information on how to wire the new socket and the AWA schematic uses different terms. I tried AI and it gave instructions to put 250 volts across the heater! So don't trust AI. In the end I just went with the Philips valve book.
I also got in a huge Peavey Guitar amp. It says it's made in the USA, but more made in China than the badge on the back says! The valves are Russian. I guess the massive transformers were made in the USA?
Work on the Panasonic RF-7270 continues.