Posted: 12/24/2015 8:55:21 PM EDT
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Daughter has been doing some creative Christmas shopping and came up with a couple of finds for my Christmas presents.
Gentlehams, I first present to you the (drumroll, please)... Toilet Radio 
The package (clever, huh?) is dated 1967. Put in a battery and it works. The next is going to require some effort, a Graybar 310 6 tube + rectifier TRF set, probably from the mid 1920s. 
From what I can tell so far, rewiring, and of course re-capping will be required. It's going to be a few days before I get to it, what with the holidays. Going to start by checking the tubes. One arrive broken, but I think I have one in another set. I'm just praying the power transformer is good. With 2.5 Volt filaments, it would be very difficult to find another, but there's plenty of room to fit whatever I can find. She won't tell me what she paid for it, but says it "was a good deal". |
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Needless to say, the "Musical John" has a shitty sound. But it did bring in quite a few stations last night. There's no tuning reduction, so selecting stations is very touchy.
Things look good so far for the Graybar. It was made in the 1928/29 time frame and the power transformer and filter chokes show continuity. All tube filaments are good. It's a miracle any tubes survived the shipping. The seller did not remove the tubes from the sockets and they all fell out, but only one broke. The #80 rectifier tests weak, but I have several of it and the one that got broken. Unfortunately, my tube tester is "too new" and doesn't list any but the rectifier so it's going to be trial and error if any tubes need to be replaced. I do have several tubes in the junk box to match then. Now to pull it from the cabinet and start fixing/replacing whatever needs attention. Except for some water de-lamination on the lid, the cabinet is in good shape. Everything polished up just fine, including the lid, so I'm not going to worry about it. |
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It uses an external high impedance speaker, but I have several Bogen T-725 "match anything to anything" tranformers, so that's not a problem.
In fact, I have an RCA 100A speaker from the time period that needs rework, so this will be a good excuse to restore it. It uses a high impedance armature type driver, which is FUBAR, but the Bogen transformer and 6 or 8 inch replacement speaker will fix that. 
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