Here's another Zenith "Ring" style radio from the pile of radios I got from the wife of a guy who had dementia and had to go into a living home. I actually forgot I had this one. Lets see what it needs to get going again.
Great work! I'm glad to see your still saving radio history. You did a great job explaining what the probelms were and what you did to repair them, and why. Enjoyed this video very much.
New subscriber, and awesome radio which is why I stumbled on your channel! Just want to give you info about Civil Defense and the Cold War. Most radios from 1953 to 1963 (including car radios, console stereo systems, and transistor radios) had to have the Civil Defense (CD) markings on the 640 and 1240 AM bands, due to the early warning systems from the Soviets. In other words this was designed to prevent enemy planes from using transmitters as navigation aids for direction finding. If these radios did not have these CD markings, then they would have the triangle-in-circles (with the letters "CD" as an option) or just triangles. CD is also called CONELRAD, which is CONtrol of ELectronic RADiation. After 1963, there was no Civil Defense due to the later threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBM's, and CONELRAD was replaced by the Emergency Broadcasting System until 1997. And nowadays we have the Emergency Alert System here in the US. One more thing to add: any Zenith radio from that time period had a dot on the 99 dial, to mark on the location of the dial of Chicago's station, 99.5 WEFM in Chicago, IL. Zenith had owned WEFM. The call letters (EFM) had stood for this gentleman, E.F. McDonald, or Eugene F. McDonald, Jr.
Those so-called "ring" radios are what Zenith called the Super Interlude model, and I'm a fan of the whole series that yours is the grand daddy of, up to the beige plastic ones (C845, H845, X337) that retained the ring (now a simple chrome and later stainless ring). I'm constantly amazed at how often, no matter how ugly and abused the cabinet looks, the chances are they'll fire right up, even with the old capacitors still in the set! Mind you, the "black beauty" time-bomb cap and selenium stink-bomb rectifier need to be replaced at some point, and sometimes they get silver mica disease, but these are incredible receivers and, in my opinion, worth restoring! By the time they got to the last tube radio, the X337, they were using ceramic caps and had a silicon diode, so when they work, you don't have to do anything "preemptive"! Of course, none of them would say no to a few squirts of contact cleaner!
Great video and well worth watching. I have one of those radios. It's so butt-ugly that, in comparison, your radio looks factory fresh! I powered mine up many years ago and, while it worked, the volume was really weak. I'm guessing the selenium rectifier is worn out and needs to be replaced. How many watts is the 51 ohm resistor? Does it go before or after the NTE 125, or does it not matter?
