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January 14, 2006
I picked this little wooden table set up on eBay a few months ago. Its owner wouldn't ship it from the small town where he lived, and my brother's in-laws live in the same town. So with no competition, I won it for just $15. My brother was nice enough to pick it up for me a few days later, and since then it's been waiting patiently for its turn. I've decided to start on it now.
As a radio it's not really much. It was made in 1938 as General Household Utilities, the owner of the name and maker of this set, lay on its deathbed. Five tubes, two bands. The shortwave band only goes to up to 4 megacycles, which means there's nothing to hear on it except WWCR at night at 3.215 mc. There's no tone control.
The five tubes include a 6A7 converter, 6D6 mixer, 75 detector-1st audio, 41 output and 80 rectifier.
I pulled the dim-bulb tester off the shelf, plugged it in and tried it out. I was pleased to find that it played reasonably well. (This is fortunate for me as Riders does not have a schematic for this unit, which means I'm flying blind in my service work.) The controls will need cleaning and the caps replaced, but electronically this should be an easy restoration. Aside from replacing the missing knob, the cabinet doesn't need much attention either. The finish is very worn, actually worn off on part of the top. But there are no chips or other veneer problems. This set should go very quickly.
Here's the underchassis view:
As you can see this is a pretty simple chassis. Along with the two filter caps in the can on top there are only eight paper caps, and they are all easy to reach and (luckily for me) marked with their values. Because of this I decided to take my first attempt at restuffing caps. Restuffing means you take the capacitor insides out of their cardboard cases, put new caps inside, and re-seal. This way the original under-chassis look is maintained. Now, this isn't really a perfect specimen for this task, as this set isn't very original. The output transformer has been replaced with a generic unit and four of the original Grunow caps along with the filter can caps have already been replaced by newer Aerovoxes. That's okay, we'll restuff them too.
Here's how it's done. In these pictures I'm replacing the audio coupling cap between the 75 and 41 tubes.
1. Remove the original capacitor from the set. Clip it out and if possible desolder the remaining bits of old wire from the terminals if you're going to do a neat job. Here's the removed cap.
2. Hold one lead with pliers and heat the whole unit with a heat gun, paying special attention to the ends, until the wax starts to melt. You'll see it bubble. When this happens, grab the other lead with another pair of pliers and pull. One of two things will happen. Either the wire lead and the wax plug at the end you pulled will come out, leaving the guts in the cardboard case, or you'll pull the guts out leaving an empty case and a plug at one end with the lead sticking out. Either way, grab on the empty case and pull the other side. You should be left with an empty case, a wax plug with a lead sticking out, and a wax plug with a lead sticking out and the guts attached. Here's the disemboweled cap.
3. Rewarm the wax plugs. You should now be able to push the leads backwards through the plugs, separating whatever guts are still attached and the lead from the plugs. Toss the guts and keep the plugs.
4. Insert a new axial-lead capacitor inside the old cardboard case. It should fit with room to spare.
5. Fill the cardboard case with hot glue, gluing the new cap inside.
6. Reinsert the wax plugs into either end of the case. Each plug will have a hole through which the old lead went. Thread it along the new lead through the old hole. If necessary, hit it with the heat gun until it's nice and smooth.
7. Reinstall the new capacitor back into the set from whence it came.
And there it is, a new cap that looks just like the old one. Works well too. At this point I have two caps done and six to go.
January 16
Only had a few minutes to work on this. I gave the volume control a thorough and profound cleaning with contact cleaner and replaced two more caps. The set is working noticeably better. I also found the shortwave band works, receiving its lone station at 3215. The station isn't to my taste though so I doubt I'll ever be switching off the broadcast band....
January 18
Good news and bad news. Good news is that the electronic work is done, and the radio is working well. Bad news, no pictures. I was in a hurry and forgot to take any.
First I replaced the four remaining paper caps, exactly as above. Then I decided to restuff the can cap also, so the new filter caps would not be visible underchassis. I've never done that before either, but it proved to be only a mild challenge. The can had two dry electrolytic capacitors, and the rest of the can was filled with tar. So first I unscrewed the holder and lifted the can out of the collar so it was only connected to the chassis by its wires. Then I used a jigsaw to cut the bottom plug off, cutting the wires off with it. That got the can separate from the chassis. Then I drilled into the tar with an electric drill, then pulled the guts out with pliers until the can was empty. Then I hot-glued the new caps into the can, soldered the new leads to the old wires and covered the bare wires and joints with heat-shrink tubing. Then I screwed the can back to the chassis. After all this the radio still worked. :-) In fact, it worked very well. For now I will forgo alignment, as the set is already pretty sensitive and the dial is accurate so I don't think it even needs a touchup right now.
In other news, Mike Koste ("Gobs of Knobs") is able to supply me with a replacement knob. I ordered it and am expecting it next week.
Anyway, now to move on to the cabinet. Stay tuned.
January 19
Just for fun I put a little Howard's Restor-a-Finish on a steel wool pad and rubbed the top of the cabinet. It shined it up, as per usual, but the top finish is a bit too bad to be saved with just this. It's alligatored enough that patches of the toning lacquer have chipped off. It doesn't look very good. It's such a small set I think I'll figure on washing the finish with my usual blend of lacquer thinner and acetone and re-coat with fresh lacquer. Won't take long.
January 20-21
The lacquer finish on the cabinet has been scrubbed with a 50-50 mix of acetone and lacquer thinner applied with 00 steel wool. The cabinet now has nice even coloring (which was not noticeably lightened by this process) and a very thin coat of smooth lacquer. However, the coloring has been completely washed off the feet, which is the only part of the set that isn't walnut veneer. I think I'll apply toner only to the feet, leave the rest of the cabinet the nice light walnut color it already is and put a few clear coats on the whole thing. After polishing the brass trim strips and escutcheon (which judging by their current look were originally bright) and reinstalling the grille cloth this set will be done.
January 23
I sprayed the feet with a couple coats of walnut toner lacquer. Then the whole cabinet was sprayed with a single light coat of the same toner and overcoated with four nice coats of clear gloss lacquer.
You know, it's a funny thing. When I use toner lacquer I always feel like I overdo it and make the toned areas too dark. So this time when I toned the feet I intentionally backed off a bit and used the lighter medium walnut shade instead of dark walnut. Now they look way too light.
The cabinet as original showed the feet a bit darker than the rest of the cabinet. Everything but the feet looks good (though it definitely needs a rubbing out; spraying in 35 degree weather doesn't always make for great results right out of the can.) So I think I'm going to re-mask and then topcoat the feet with dark walnut toner, then clearcoat and see how it looks. Then when the knob arrives later this week I'll rub out the cabinet, reinstall the grille cloth and reassemble the set. That ought to do it.
January 24
Well, that didn't take long. This looks better.
The cabinet's done. The knob from Mike also arrived today. Looks good (Thanks Mike!)
Radio is almost done. I'd still like to get some brass polish to polish the escutcheon and trim strips, put it together and we'll be all done.
January 28
I reassembled the radio the other day and brought it to work to use for the rest of the week. It worked very well. I'm pleased with it.
I haven't bothered to go buy any brass polish yet, so that's not done, and I noticed when I glued the grillecloth back in it's a little loose at the bottom so I'm going to have to pull the chassis to fix that yet too. Other than that, I guess the set is done. I'm pondering what to do with it. I don't know if I'm going to keep it or sell it. Oh well, there's no rush to decide.
January 30, 2006
That's it. It's done.
I'm sure some people will revile me for what I did to the escutcheon and trim strips. But looking at the inside of the escutcheon and the backs of the strips, I really do not believe these were originally artifically darkened at the factory. I think they were actually left bright to go with the bright gold dial. So I found the bottle of brass polish in the back of the cabinet, polished them, lacquered them and reinstalled. I think they look great.
One thing I always thought odd about this set - look at the power transformer. It's a laydown style, and normally chassis that use this style transformer have a large hole such that the bottom end bell is under the chassis and short bolts are used to mount the transformer to the chassis. Grunow (and I've seen this in some of their other sets) mounted the transformer so that the end bell is actually resting on top of the chassis and very long bolts are used to bolt it down. How strange. I wonder why they did that...
Anyway, now the set is occupying the coveted spot on top my computer desk hutch, telling me how badly the Milwaukee Bucks are losing tonight (to the freakin' Hornets, yet. Sheesh.) Anyway, the set works great and looks great. I'm really pleased with this little set. So that's the end of this short story, thanks for reading!
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