90 year old Sparton Radio restoration part 2 

It probably will.. customer called me back to say how well it works. Money well spent.

Out the side

I made about 100 on this by the time the parts were in. Now considering that I spent 2 afternoons on it, and a trip to the big city on Saturday afternoon to buy the caps needed it really wasn't that much. I have a few old floor radios that people have given me, and I doubt that I will ever get to it. Will probably just give them away to someone else that wants to spend the time restoring.

@@12voltvids 100 is not bad for the time it has taken. I only do restore work these days for previous customers that understand whatt is required to do a full restoration and don't complain abot the total cost. It is still a labour of love, but the end results provide a level of satisfaction that basic repairs don't.

Thanks again!

What wax. They are removed.

@12voltvids Well, you know what they say, if you gotta ask ....

Thats correct. Make it safe but these old radios are collector items. You put them on shelf and show them off but they are not daily drivers. Too valuable to use all the time because tubes wear out. My collection gets less than an hour a year basically. They are just show pieces.

I couldn't get a single AM signal at my house until I put up one of those cheap chinese "miniwhip" antennas and ran coax into the room. Now I get an almost full band most hours of the day/night. I am so rural we have no AM coverage, 1 mostly-automated FM station, and no TV coverage unless you put up an outdoor antenna (and even then there's no promises).

I do have a tube tester. Also an old sig gen but I wouldn't trust it as it hasn't been turned on since 1969. Its only guaranteed to misaligned stuff

@@12voltvids Got ya maybe you find a newer one to work with. Awesome job as always. -Cheers!

No because apparantly i have lost interest in the hobby. Most of my ham friends are silent keys. All the guys I used to work on fm TV are all dead, probably from the constant exposure to high power transmitters and microwaves and stuff they inhaled. (Smoke, solvents ect)

@@12voltvids I've seen some good people taken out because of strange sicknesses in this broadcast industry. I work around high power RF so I try to be cautious when working in high RF environments, one afternoon we were working on a 30KW FM transmitter with the exhaust open from the tube cavity with it operating, I got the worst headache in no time, went away after stepping outside, RF exposure is real. Being a millennial most of my friends can't even spell RF or even have a license, so I get discouraged sometimes trying to work strangers on HF cuz most of the time they are 20+ years or more older than me - a few days ago I answered a CQ from a ham 52 years older than me. But I digress, once again great content you post.

@@djernairchecks OK, so now we are on the same wavelength. I wouldn't call myself an "elder" in ham radio but I have been licensed since the early 90's. Got my ticket just before they removed the code requirement. Got my license mainly because I knew a few guys that had theirs and tinkering around with fast scan TV and microwaves, and EME (earth moon earth) communicayion and AMSATs ect. I played around mostly in the 50 to 2.4GHz bands. I set up an HF station, but never really did much with it. Some code work early on, and some digital modes like AMTOR and RTTY, Packet ect. Mostly on VHF, 220 and 440 FM bands as well as DMR and Fusion modes. Again only talking with a small group that has become much smaller in the past few years with many going SK. When I was in school, I trained for broadcast TV. That was actually my career goal. When I was in high school I worked at one of the local TV repair shops and learned the basics but it certainly was not my dream job. I was being pressured to go work for the telephone company as my uncle worked there, as did my cousin (my mothers twin sisters oldest daughter was an operator) so the pressure was on to continue the family tradition of joining the phone company. Of course being a know it all teenager I wanted none of that but to keep my mother happy I applied when I was in high school, but didn't get selected because the quota was filled. There was a hiring blitz on between 75 and 80 and I didn't graduate till 81. So that was out. I had an interest in TV production as I had been a voluneer at the local community station since I was 16 in 79, which was the minimum age to work there. I enjoyed it, but was told that if I wanted to get a job there for pay I needed to complete the television production course at BCIT, so I went to school. In the end I did get hired for master control in the summer of 82. My dream job, for 5 bucks an hour! That was better than the no pay I had been getting. After about 7 months on the air I had an equipment failure, 3/4" vtr ate a tape on air, and the backup machine was in the shop. My supervisor called to find out why we were off the air and I explained that the only machine I had to go to air with had 10 feet of tape jammed in it. His response was to ask if I called the engineer. I had paged him but he was out for the night. My supervisor asked if I could carefully try to remove the tape and clean the machine. These units had no top cover as cleaning was part of my job. I unwound the tape and left it on the super's desk as he had asked, cleaned the machine and went back on the air. Thought I did a good deed. BZZT WRONG. I was fired the next day as the engineer was pissed at me, and his head was so far up managements ass that when te talked you could see the station owners lips move. Not only did I get fired I found myself on the broadcast blacklist. The letter of recommendation had a knife sticking out of it and into my back. Paraphrasing it went something like I needed supervision and direction as my zest for learning how the equipment operated had annoyed the engineers on multiple occasions. Anyway where was I going with this... Oh yes, 3 of the other guys I knew that were cameramen and one was an editor did their internship and then landed jobs at a new startup station, where they had what I would call unfulfilling careers in TV. I say that because all 3 of them are dead and were dead around the year 2003. Even the guy that did the music I use for some of my recent openings is now dead. He was an engineer, in broadcast, knew the engineers at the station I worked with went to engineering school with one guy, that's actually how I found out about his music. Anyway around 2003 I was out on Canada day at a local park with my kids. Being in the production business I had my betacam out taking home videos. This guy walks up to me and asked who I was shooting for seeing I had a big camera. I told him I was just there with my kids for the festivities. (mine were young 3 and 5 at the time) He told me he was a retired engineer from CKVU TV. Well that was the station that the guys I had worked with in 1980 ended up so I dropped a few names, and then the guy started telling me that all 3 were dead. He pointed at the B/W viewfinder on the camera and said "That killed them, XRays from professional monitors" The 2 cameramen had brain tumors. The field cameraman had one behind his right eye, and t he studio cameraman had one in his forhead right where the monitor would be closest. The editor died of pancreatic cancer. 3 people I knew all working in TV all dead by the age of 40. To make things even scarier my neighbour's son worked for Pixar as a computer animator. His name is in the credits of Finding Nemo, Toy Story and Cars. He worked very long hours sitting in front of large silicon graphics professional 21" CRT monitors. These were something like 20 grand each. and he had several. He also died from internal cancers as have many others that were on his team. He was only in his mid 30's when he passed. His mother gave me his laser disk player and laser disk collection. Lived up the street. I remember him driving his car around with the PIXAR license plate frame (that's on his mothers car now). She is also convinced that radiation from all the CRT monitors got him. There is no love lost between me and CRT monitors even though I di have a small one just displaying the time over my bench. The consumer CRT sets were not bad, as they had to pass the cosmetics and radiation emitting device regulations. The same could not be said for monitors produced for industrial applications. They could crank the crap out of the EHT (and they did) to get a very sharp picture and that resulted in xray production that would never have been permitted on consumer TVs. So, is there a link. I think so. I don't buy into cell phones, and 5G cellular as being bad, but hogh level RF from a transmitter site, and all the xray exposure in TV stations definitely. 4 people I know from the same industry with rare cancers? Actually 5, my business partner died of leukemia. He ran the tape duplicating part of the operation. I would shoot and edit our corporate videos, and Gordie would sit in his garage with 25 VCRs and 25 small 14" TVs and run off copies all day. Many of the productions required 3 or 4000 copies as they were being send out as product demos so he would be sitting in his garage changing 25 tapes every 10 minutes and checking each and every one on all these little cheap TVs all stacked up on shelving in his garage. He would have been in there probably 8 hours a day every day. I had my bank of monitors in the edit suite too, but I was there for perhaps 4 or 5 hours a week in front of them.

I have probably half a dozen hot chassis radio. Nothing to them.

Have you ever heard a cat with its tail in a door? I never thought my ears could bleed. I was wrong.

We used to have an inspector at work. He took on the job of QA in the months before he retired that would follow us all around and inspect our work and take pictures of deficiencies he found. Things like not replacing the #14ga ground wire with #6 was a big fail. I remember once he clipped me because the drop wire before it went to the protector was not groomed to his standards. (German asshole) This guy had been in a different department prior and was shuffled into I&R in 2006, and I had the pleasure of being his drop cut in charge training these new telephone men how to climb and change out drops. Every 2 weeks I got a batch of new hires and right at the end of the hiring they gave us a batch of old wash up guys from other departments that were being shut down. Some came from the print shop where they printed phone bills, others were mechanics that were being retrained. Anyway this guy didn't last a a telephone man, so they made him an inspector and he was an anal jerk. Would nit pick. Kink in a wire, FAIL. He would have shit the bed if he saw a knot in a wire to keep it from pulling out of the chassis.

Looks like the audio output trany has been replaced and possibly the speaker.

Send me 100 to buy a new one. This one lasted 6 months.

Nothing a little penetrating oil wouldn't fix! 🙂

Oil won't fix that. The metal plate under the seat is broken at the weld. These chairs are just shit. They don't last. It was something like 100 and it didn't even last a year.

Can't be fixed without welding and I don't have a welder nor know how to weld. A new chair is 150.00. This one is only 6 months old. Piece of shit.