My friend Richard gave me an old tube RCA radio that he found when he was working somewhere. He knew I was into old stuff; tools, records, bicycles and stuff like that. The radio has been sitting on a bookshelf in my home for about seven months now, it looks nice. My wife sort of dusted it off and sat it there as a decoration. I was content with the state it was in for the months that it sat on the shelf. It became part of the decor I guess, right above the records, next to the books. I almost forgot about it.
Then one day I was reading a forum about amp building and someone mentioned turning an old radio into an amp. Apparently all you have to do is wire an input jack onto the volume pot and disconnect a diode for the tuner and you can play a guitar through it. It sounded way too easy. I thought about the old radio on the shelf. Could I turn it into an amp? Maybe it was a collectors item and worth some money? If it was rare then maybe I shouldn't alter it because it might lose some value. Maybe it wasn't even possible.
I started to do some research on it to find out what it was worth, if anything. After a couple of hours of searching around and being overwhelmed by the massive amount of information and the disorienting multitudes of radios I stumbled on a website that let me search for models based on what tubes they used. 6D6, 6C6, 43, and a 25Z5 Raytheon tubes. I came up with a radio that was made in the 30's for export to Portugal. Well it wasn't exactly the same, the cabinet was a little different but the mechanical design was pretty similar. This wasn't my exact radio but I figured that it was enough information to determine I didn't have a collectors item on my hands. And besides I remember my uncles unspoken philosophy on the way he regarded antique cars; nothing is sacred. I remember seeing a 34 Ford coup convertible body with the firewall cut out so he could fit some other motor in it. The motor I don't remember so much, I'm not sure he ever got to that part. I just remember it sitting in the same spot each time I came to visit and I remember the other rare cars that he would chop up and rebuild to take to the drag strip each week as well.
Point is, I play guitar, I don't collect radios. It could sit on the shelf for years and remain in the state it's in or I could see if I can put it to use. So that is where I am at now. I have taken it apart and done some initial inspection. First, I pulled what I first thought to be a makeshift baffle out around the speaker. I thought maybe it could have been to stop a rattle or something. Maybe it was, or maybe it was a rat nest. That's still a mystery. There are also plenty of bare wires from either the rat or time. It has (had) cloth insulated wire and it's all but a memory now. It's a good thing the power plug was broke into pieces or my usual impatient self would have plugged it in first thing and blew it up. There are old oil in paper caps that are completely disintegrated too. So I will have to decide what I will replace them with. This is a project that is going to take some time so I guess I don't need to make those decisions just yet.
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