Add Collector Radio with airSlate SignNow

Add collector radio

we've talked a long time about having classes how to fix radios now in this club there's a very there's a lot of skill there's a lot of people are really advanced in electronics we want to bring people up to the date where we're at I have 60 years into this or possibly war now being a Kutztown for years I'm an avid collector at least there was an avid collector but we fix thousands of radios thousands and a lot of radios we get our really s obese that other people have been it really ticked them up now if you want to get into radio work any of it there's things that you have to accumulate there's some things you have to really look for and what I brought here is a sample of actually a working shop there's a couple instruments that didn't bring because you're too big and they're too heavy now the story of the real radio comes right here to the All American five prior to that there was a lot of Engineers did a lot of work but there was a problem there was a problem because the electric lighting system that came along was a war between Tesla and Edison all right half in New York biggest metropolis back in the 30s part of New York was DC the other part was they see the other position was also Chicago partially DC partially AC and now 1926 or 1925 was the first AC sets now if you lived in New York you didn't need much of a radio if you had 1520 stations within a few miles if you're in a high-rise you didn't need much so anyway you bought the radios that were up there now the most infamous of the radios is probably the Emerson radio if you want to fix the radio and you want to start with something simple go get in Emerson you'll find out there's nothing in it there's a beautiful cabinet it's worth a fortune it Emerson never even made Ingram eight but if you take a look out you might have seven parts in the dancing well they didn't need much game they didn't need much sensitivity because you had all these stations now you turn around you could buy one of their radios for 995 or something like that the reason that radio worked the ac/dc radio if you take a look at this circuit we're not going to go into this circuit too much we're going to point about tools but if you notice that all the filaments in there are in series those tubes are called constant current in other words if you took a 12-volt tube in there and you put a hundred and 50 milliamps through it it would develop 12 volts it didn't know if it was AC or DC this was brilliant engineering prior to that they used sets from the early 30s which they used the curtain burners he actually dropped the voltage inside the set in the line cord depending where you had it you burned your house down that's a fact now the other thing that's important about this you always hear about a very AK and an isolation transformer this is the case where you need it because prior to right after World War two most sets were not ul certified the plug was never polarized one side of the line went to the chassis now if you're working on one of these first of all we always encourage you to have a very AK the reason you have a very act is number one when you find if set that's been sitting around for 50 years you don't want to plug that sucker in wall there's a good chance if you have a console or something like that you might burn out the field in the speaker because you have a short of input building so really what you want to do is you want to bring up the voltage slow but the variac has a hotter arm on it one of those connections is hot when that wiper comes around so what we're saying is that's why you use an isolation transformer that decouples the very act from the set that you're trying to work on the other reason to use an isolation transformer is because if you don't pay attention to it you can blow up your test equipment a lot of times as you're working on something if you don't have it take your piece of test equipment take the probe and touch the chassis and tuck the chassis you're on you might be surprised to see 120 volts that's why the isolation transformer is important these are probably the two most expensive pieces that you can buy yes they cost a lot but if you want it's a shame we couldn't had this before Kutztown there's so much of this stuff out there was unbelievable and especially the older equipment the older equipment everybody wants to get rid of they want digital this they want digital that this that that guess what that stuff breaks you can't fix it but guess what we're going to fix the radio from 1938 so you pull out the schematic it says supposed to read 85 volts on this particular screen grid you come along you take your Simpson and I'm gonna talk about this meter an awful lot if you are a repairman you get one of these this is the finest meter that was out there a multimeter the other thing about it is they're plentiful you buy a triplet there's a hundred of these out there for a triplet this meter is a twenty thousand ohm per volt meter the meters that were all used in the 30s and into the late 40s were 1000 ohm per volt okay now that's a one millimeter whenever you're taking a reading with the meter you're going into parallel with circuit in other words what you're doing is you're drawing current out of the circuit so if you have a schematic 1938 all right we'll work on a set like that you go up there and you take this meter you go to read the voltage it says in there if this radio is working white should read 85 volts in the plate you put this on it might read 115 volts you said oh my god just got to be something wrong in here there's nothing wrong but a thousand-dollar volt meter is hard to come by but there's an easy way to do it with this all you gotta do is put if you have the 250 volt scale put a 250 K resistor across the input it now brings the meter down to $1,000 volt and you'll read right if you're working on a hick Hawk tube checker you go to calibrate it there is no filtering on a hickok tube checker it's raw AC voltage the $1,000 voltmeter is needed to calibrate a hick heart and what you're doing in there is you're loading the circuit you put this on there it'll read 225 you put that resistor in there with that 250 K resistor it'll read 150 it'll probably been in 1% now the also beauty of this meter is that some features on here which are amazing most people don't realize it there's a thing called AC output okay you don't need a scope you could take that and look at your power supply you could take a look at that end of that power supply right here AC output you can actually see the ripple the same way to scope will do it that blocks the DC the AC output there's a cap in there that blocks DC and it'll only pick up the AC it's not peaked a peak but it'll be peak if you look at the first filter in that circuit the first electrolytic that's in there okay you will see ripple but you go to the second filter that's called a PI circuit alright the second filter should see nothing very very very little now again I don't want to get into this circuit because we don't have enough time but what I'm going to show you here is some some things that we have some components suppose you want to find a Simpson like this this is very important they still sell these today now you go out and get the Harbor Freight meter and all the digital you'll never fix the rating with those things I'm going to tell you you don't know what the impedance is you don't know what this is you don't know what the resolution is these are very very accurate if you're gonna look for one you see one out of me bring yourself a couple resistors these are precision ten ohms thousand ohms hundred thousand ohms this will read up to 20 mega ohms okay not only does this do AC output how about you want to check batteries you guys check batteries for old each you know check batteries for old each you go to the top you go to the 10 F plus an antenna - put the leads on it this D cell is thriving 3 amperes you know that's a good battery because sitting there with a high impedance meter you go across it'll read a bolt in half once you put a load on that battery it's down the mud okay on this table these are the things that normally you might use to objec that man has the best tube checker that's ever out there that's the one he Chuck's his tubes with that particular two checker is a military-grade set that'll run a 6l6 at 450 volts even the best portable Hickok yeah even the best uh yeah it's a fantastic unit the other thing about a Hickok is something else to know if you kind of do radios what you want to do is either buy tubes from him and keep a set for test not to be used you can be fixed so many times on a tube because number one the majority Tube checkers that are out there our admission checkers all they're doing is counting mission optic off the cathode they are not putting a signal in the grid and actually what happens if you put a signal into the grid you see the tube actually amplified now the best tube checker you can buy you'll pay more money for in fact if you buy any instruments I'll show you some other eye stuff that I have here and most of its military and the reason it's military is because it's built goddamn good and you taxpayers paid a lot of money for it the other thing is this when you're buying test equipment the best deal you can find as Heath kit and why do I say that because inside that book on that Heath kit is an explanation how every circuit works you can be a dummy and you can go in there you can see how to troubleshoot this they'll explain part for part the parts are also generic they're not something that's really odd wall and almost all those sets so what do you think you buy in a Heath kit is great and also because it doesn't take up much space it's small instead of getting a Hilda packard this big okay well I guess get another bench to put that on you know I myself use it a unit called a URM 25 boy if you see one of these these are babies these are real babies can you project us I didn't want to bring it down it's too heavy those things are fabulous they go 250 megahertz but what they do have is a calibrated output attenuator now having a calibrated output attenuator is actually telling you exactly what the sensitivity of of something is there's a lot of generators out there you can buy really really cheap there you go Aiko's another good word there you go that's the kind of stuff that you can get that stuff is all fixable you find that old piece of equipment you open it up make sure the filters are good that's about it maybe you have to clean your control well there's another way to calibrate them let me tell you how you do that you have a digital meter if you're looking for 455 kilohertz now 455 kilohertz the way as superheterodyne works is the idea is to take every frequency that comes down from whatever radio station you have and turn around and beat it with against an oscillator and you come out with a fixed frequency so you can constantly amplify across this if one can is down a little bit the gains gonna be off if you find the older radios with the if' cans in them with little adjustments on the top I guarantee you they'll be off they're always off but then again you take the Simpson put it on the AC output put it right across the speaker leads you go in there start turn I can all you'll see that on the lowest scale you see that that signal starting to walk up you cannot hear the difference it takes three decibels of change in your ear before you can hear a difference this thing will show it to you right away this is how you get the gain up okay we got that so you don't have a tube checker so you come in and say okay well I don't have a tube checker I can't afford one Acey deucey set comes in you turn that on bring it up on the very a could you see no lights no power light no nothing bug your tubes in the floor mats are open bank fix one in two minutes all right don't have a signal generator this is all primitive sent Corey equipment this is stuff I got when I was 16 years old or 15 years old puts out an audio signal or on her cycles you want to hear if the audios were can put it on a center tap of the arm control okay we got the audio section now we're talking about a radio no matter what it is that you're working on 90% or 80% of the power is in the audio stage from that power supply the rest of the stuff draws peanuts that's a fact if there's caps in there they're shot if you have a capital asset or checker which is I have a picture over here of a to6 you can pick these up for peanuts where's the to6 okay all right these our goal is gonna be out of calibration but guess how you calibrate them you know those little yellow caps that would you buy I have a three thousand dollar cap sugar and when we buy those caps those are personally made if it's a double low 47 that's exactly what it'll read so if you have a cap checker and you're trying to look at what the value is on something do you just put that cap across it because the verniers are hard to read they are hard to read the same thing with any generator any RF gener 8200 see a unit that was sold for many many years through the 30s late 30s up into 50s I see them in the shops who are still in the 60s again the calibration is very very hard to read okay you want to find out where 455 is take your little $10 transistor radio whatever you have or the one with a digital readout turn it up to nine nine ten nine ten on that radio then tune your generator and all the sudden you'll hear this beep when you hit 455 the one will beep against the other you just calibrated your generator so now you know that works so in other words what I'm trying to say is the items that I brought down here are things that you can buy really cheap yes I do have sophisticated stuff but basically this is all you really need here's another thing don't laugh at these never laugh at these most of the people that have an iron they sit there on a on a socket pin and her sitting there and heating and heating and heating and heat and wait for the solder to melt you're heating it too long once you break a pin off you'll find out what it's all about the other thing about it is hey look you could snap the other one off you can leave the other winding on there it's not gonna hurt nothing just get a little turn but when you're doing it use the finest solder you can get not the plumber's solder this makes them the big stuff makes a mess as long as it's ront rosin core you only need a little bit that's all you really need another thing when we fix the radio these are available these are actually really beautiful very cheap this is a watt meter now when you look at most of your prints you'll see on there this draws so much current if the radio is working right now we're talking like transformer radios that are bigger you might have a lot of problems in there to keep the power transformer within its range you take this and you plug it into the wall plug the radio in this you can watch the current on that thing you can see what the wattages you can see if there's something wrong in there you can see if the transformer is going to give you a problem now let me tell you something we're gonna get into other radios in the future and that water canopy have it cut the cord off it because you plug that into a wall baby you're gonna kiss a goodbye there was never enough copper in there transformers but Philco every transformer they May from 1920 on was good for 125 volts we have never replaced one they'll work in an inkay what burns up in the ake a transformer believe it or not is the fact that the tubes at the time were 2 volts 2 volt tube draws 300 mils per tube plus the pilot lights pilot light is a quarter of an ampere okay you take the tubes that you start out the currents you'll see that you're running eight or nine amps of filament current that's a hell of a lot of current and that's why they burn up as soon as you get over a hundred volts on those damn things that filament current starts to go up like it just goes ballistic and they do sell a replacement for it but the real secret is find a Philco transformer no junk Philco chassis that has a power transformer is not worth saving okay what else do I have on here I know I don't wanna get I've been yakking all night but this is a fabulous book this was put out by Girardi there's a lot in here about if' instruction there's a lot in here about Alice tubes there's a lot in here about wire resistors that look like cloth that are coated there are actually read the same as a normal resistor would read after you guys don't know what this is this is how to decode the resistors but the Delaware Valley Club had printed Stan had printed a beautiful sheet how to read the Micah's and all this kind of stuff now when you're going to start doing these radios assume every capacitors bad just do it the other thing you got to know about it that you're going to find out is once you change those components that radio is an analog system it no longer is tuned to what it should be it has to be realigned and it's a very easy thing to do will actually probably do one down here and show you how it's done let's see what else do I have here's a nice tool solder sucker couple dollars when you've got a big wad in there you want to try and get out here's a cutter when you cut it it holds the lead so it doesn't drop down in the chassis these are alignment tools they're not metal the reason I say that when you first hit the first candidate has high voltage on it and you're going to short it out to the case you just lost in high F Gann and the worst you could do is on a field call it feel co-cathedral the little studs that sit out the back they're hot they used to originally have a little grommet across them with a little metal grommet to keep you from going in there go touch one of them seater I'm also light up okay there's another little Tootsie Tootsie for working around and solder connections if you're not good at soldering cut the part off just make sure you remember where is that the bottom of the radio when you're looking at with octal tubes is clockwise from the key okay if you're fortunate enough and you find one of these you can do everything from the top you just plug that in pin numbers are right on there use a little alligator clip some of these you could take your readings up there up top you don't have to hang it upside down or whatever alright what else we got here in toys I was gonna show you how to battery you could check a battery a decent battery but on the tap scale don't put on anything else than 10 app scales up by itself and you'll know how long that battery's gonna last or how good it is the other thing I want to talk about on this 260 is if you find one they made these for so many years and by the way they still selling today I think you look that up how much honey today the thing about it is the most common one but when you go for one make sure you get one with the red pointer and there's a reason for that the earlier ones had a black pointer you make a serious mistake and you got a question mark you don't have a pointer anymore or you can break it off the red band pointer is called taut band suspension you can wrap that sombitch and he'll always come back it's a different in a meter movement design this is probably the best tool you could possibly have there's a spare fuse in the back the battery standard to nine volt and a d-cell we used to be able to solder the diesels in but the batteries have no goddamn good anymore you can't solder to a middle melt the connection all right what else do we have here yeah we talked about Heathkit shrink tubing it's always nice to have that then you're putting something in the magic sauce that every says don't use it well let me tell you something about this little sauce that you have here this is perfect for volume controls you know you'll wash out a bell on control years ago they used to use trichloroethylene all right you know you'll die from that supposedly cancer what this does is leave a film on it in other words that wd-40 what it does it lubricates the carbon element and it actually works really good and the other thing about working on these little ac/dc radios is almost all the controls are the same value so you don't have to bump a $25 or 20 bucks for control they're all 500k in some cases one Meg alright so you got that then if you're an old bastard like me this really comes in handy I mean you can't beat this for working on stuff now we know about that we know that modern resistors have changed a lot now if you look at these you can hardly even see them but if you look at them was it's a 1 watt look at these they look like an eighth one they're one watt all right you have an electrolytic can a lot of tail radios don't have electric politicans so them do leave it in there build around it use the comment for the ground take your B+ lead and whatever you want unless you want to pay five or six dollars from one of these the firecrackers we call it or guess what you could do these for about 69 cents apiece or something like that okay here's another example this is what they call a dog bone you guys know what a dog bone resistor is with the little leads around the end these babies they're funny but make me tell you something about we've had a couple in fact in the last month we had two already where the resistors ratings right on you turn asset on nothing happens as soon as the current goes through that thing it opens when it's cold it looks alright okay and there's another thing you could probably use if you wanted to is probably supremist whatever let's see here's some more components that now if you see any Tiger brand resistors I mean capacitors this is a Philco version that reads point o2 it's all over the planet the ones that I'm talking about I couldn't find any they were all in the garbage these are the black things that the the audio guys want to put in or their amps to make them sound better well baby how I tell you what don't wonder there's no audio up the tubes because those suckers are leaking like a bastard these make better resistors any wood capacitors and when we find out when these caps get old they not only leak but the insulation goes away between the aluminum foil and what they call the cellulose it's in there or the wax paper and as that starts to degrade the capacity goes up if you look at it it's supposed to be a point on to your ear it's when all five what the hell we see this all the time and not only being that direct shorted whatever but those gay gotta go usually I think that we've always find those in the end we're always on the line side you'd always find one on the line where the rest of the caps are always saying I think it was because it was a fuse I'll tell you the truth because if you guys worked at enough these radios he looked at the bottom where that line cord to come in you see it's blown apart I had a radio playing their little Westinghouse he was playing beautiful and I just got a go and I'm sitting there and all sudden I see the smoke clogging the water there's smoke pouring I this thing like a chimney is playing great music that cap is what exploded it's still played but of all the things that we could talk about these are all just junk components from the last guy come down the pike but we have to start off with the ac/dc set in the main reason why is because it contains all the principles of all radios it's all in there the only other difference is the fact that the frequency ranges have changed and when you say about a little table radio there's nothing nothing that will work really good it's depends on who made it not every radio is 995 the worst radios made were Catalans I think the money was in the case I mean they they'll play like I said if you're a Manhattan you can get five six stations that's fine but the cost of components is a difference if you look at the if' cans that's where all the gain was in these radios that's really where the game was if you look for a replacement part you'll look in the book and they'll say well there's one for a dollar there's one for two dollars there's one for four dollars there's a difference there's a difference in the way it's whelmed the cue of the transform is higher it gives you a better peak and more gain so what you do find in that Emerson that you bought up in New York is the cheapest goddamn parts that are on the planet they never needed much to get reception some of the sets if you can get a bakelite RCA 48 something like that they all have an extra stage on it instead of a 5 2 R it's a 6 tuber that will be enough to give you another gain of probably 10 before you even go when you started to modulate or you start to mix with your Penta grid converter it's in there but basically I know you don't have all this stuff but I'll tell you what the old stuff is easy to find you don't need anything new to fix this stuff if you're gonna go into FM you might need a few other things special maybe alignment tools FM's a story all by itself ok I talked to your ears off