1933 RCA Cathedral Radio Model 120 Repair and Spruce Up 

Does it have Marine Band? It must...

The Marine Band is great. They have their own RU-vid channel... Enough puns I guess.

Probably the worst/'most-amusing' case of motorboating I've encountered.

Thanks! I hope it gives you many years of good service.

@@tomcarlson3913 what’s the best antenna hook up for this radio?

@@keithrichards8969 The Best antenna hookup is to string about 100' of wire between your house and a tree keeping the wire over 10' in the air (connect the house end to the antenna wire of the radio), and to connect the radio's ground to a metal water pipe or building ground. Until loop antennas became popular in the later 30's longwire antennas were the standard. You can probably get away with ~25' of antenna wire strung along the floor of an above ground room as a way to get fairly decent results without too much effort. My basement workshop antenna is basically ~25-45' of wire strung along the basement rafters.

I probably should have done that...I've got a modest collection of golden age radio recordings from digital on down to 16" inside start program transcription discs. Some Fibber McGee & Molly, or Jack Benny, etc would have rounded this video out nicely.👍

🤣 If you're ever around Waukesha I've got a whole bankers box of paper caps (for incase I decide to restuff something that's been recapped before) that I could/would give away if someone wanted it.

Thanks but I don't bother restuffing caps either. Someone might like them though.

While not exactly a dream to service, these are far from the worst I've had to deal with. Sears and Wards sold some sets where the caps were packed in to the chassis in layers along with a tangle of rubber wiring that crumbles if disturbed (changing anything but tubes in those is Pandora's box), and Philco Predicta TVs it's either un-wire and remove the entire circuit board (something like 30 wires) or un-wire 5% to get a 2" gap to solder it like building a ship in a bottle. There are companies that can rebuild speakers for a price...You can also substitute speakers. If the output transformer is still good all you have to do is find something with a close voice coil impedance...If the sub has a field coil all the better, but if not a field coil can be replaced with a run of the mill B+ choke or even a power resistor.

This was RCA's answer to the Philco Jr (the Jr family started with the Philco 80 IIRC). Which was Philco's cheapest radio...A $20 4 tube super-regenerative (Superhet with regenerative IF amp). In a way it makes sense RCA would respond to an unusual design with their own unusual design.

Glad this video was helpful. Generally speaking in 30's radios caps rated less than 1000pF=.001uF are almost always mica or air dielectric caps, and anything .001uF and up is almost always paper (till you reach electrolytic territory). Generally speaking mica cap failure is fairly rare especially in the plastic encapsulated caps. I take a legal system approach to micas...I assume they're innocent until proven guilty. I have heard of bad micas, but I've only really seen any bad ones in deflection circuits of early post war TVs. They aren't really worth changing until you find a bad one through troubleshooting. Tubes do sometimes go stone dead with a good heater. Sometimes a good cathode acts like a getter and the outer surface absorbs gas and becomes insulative...CRTs develop this problem and collectors call it sleeping sickness. When a tube goes to sleep you can sometimes wake it up by clicking the tester heater to the next highest setting and testing the tube. I've also seen testers that don't like a speciffic type number tube. My Heathkit tester I use on the old fat pin types is fairly accurate for everything except for type 78 which it always thinks is weak or dead...Even NOS examples that other collectors have tested on other testers read weak on mine...On type 78's I've taken the stance that if it works in the radio my tester should be ignored.

No, but most 20's - mid 30's radios don't sound much better (if they don't sound worse than this). I don't own it anymore so there's no checking it now.

Film caps possibly. Electrolytic caps unlikely. Modern film capacitors started with Sprague Orange Drops around 1960. Sixty years later about 90% of Orange Drops are still good enough for radio. A good brand of film capacitor like Panasonic could potentially last longer. Electrolytics have both gotten better and gotten worse (google capacitor plague to see what I mean) depending on brand. Still at best case scenario if you run lytics for more than 30 years you're probably risking the equipment they're in. Modern caps are still worlds better than 1930's caps that often didn't last the first 2 years of the products life without one or more failing. If I wanted to recap a radio for absolute maximum longevity I would replace all the paper caps with 1KV ceramics, and replace the filter lytics with film capacitors. They make film caps as large as 10uF at voltages that would work in most radios, but they're EXPENSIVE...Technically some 30's radios never had electrolytic caps, before electrolytics were developed many radio makers used gigantic 4uF 450V paper caps so using film lytics is doable. I do a mixture of radios and TVs so I don't stock ceramic caps (they have unfavorable temp stability for replacing paper caps in TVs).

That's possible. I never found it so it's either under the IF can, in the IF can, never installed due to a production change not documented in the schematic I was using, or deleted by a previous repair man. It's also possible I wasn't reading the schematic right. The scans I often look up on nostalgia air tend to be Bigfoot sighting photo level image quality...