When I was about eight years old , in 1967, my father gave my brother and I transistor radios and it looked similar to the one you were repairing. We were visiting my grandparents in Jackson , Mississippi and we went to a guy's house down the road and he was about twelve years old. He was into electronics and stuff and he was showing us a little room that he had on the side of the house where apparently he was working on a crystal radio which I knew nothing about at the time. He asked me, because I was the younger brother and apparently the dumbest at the time, if he could borrow my radio for a minute. He just needed to borrow something from it he said and that he would give it back. Not knowing any better and fairly trusting as a child I let him see my radio. He was doing things to it I didn't understand and then he started fooling around with his crystal radio set. And then he let us listen to the little earphone on his crystal radio set and asked us if we didn't think that was wonderful as he let us listen to different stations. I said well that's nice but my radio's louder and he handed my radio back to me but it no longer worked. He had stolen the diode out of my radio and I told him to put it back and fix it and he wouldn't do it. I went to the front door of his house and knocked and when his father answered I told him what his son had done and that I wanted him to put my radio back the way it was. And remember, I was 10 years old, but his father looked at me and told me to screw off, that I shouldn't have had anything to do with his son. I went back and told my parents and I don't think anything was ever done about it because my radio never worked again. That was a lesson for me in life at an early age , which I never forgot.
We have all been there. When I was a kid we used to ride dirt bikes around and one of the guys ran out of gas and wanted to "borrow" some of mine to get back. I let him drain some gas from my bike so he could ride back instead of push it. When I asked him to replace the gas he blew me off. That was a mistake. I planned my revenge carefully and after a few bottles of soda I was ready to launch my attack. Let's just say engines don't run very good on piss. We all got a good laugh because right when he was going up the ramp of a jump his engine died and well he wiped out spectacularly. All of us just roared. We all dam near pissed out pants we were laughing so hard. He couldn't figure out why his bike died. It wouldn't start again. It was a long way to push it through the sand and home. He was sure he blew the engine up and took it all apart looking for the problem. It wasn't until he drained the tank that he figured it out. Since he had pissed off a few people in the group over the years he had no idea who did it and since we all (except me) stored our bikes at another friend's place that was close to the place we used to ride he never did find out. Nobody admitted to the prank, but we all got a good laugh.
@@12voltvids That's A good one, I was a bit young and not really mischievous and plus we were just visiting.We were gone after another week.Or so , so I never had a chance to think of any revenge.
How i pulled it off was genius. Remember I said I had a couple sodas right. So we were all out riding and we would take breaks and just hang out. There was a stand of "relief trees" and everyone would just take turns heading to the stand of trees for privacy. I walked back there carrying an empty green pop bottle and came back with a full one. When backs were turned it took all of 5 seconds to empty it into his fuel. A few minutes later it was time to ride. Took a few minutes to make its way to the carb and then bam, stall out no start. Of course It happened at the precise moment that he was going over and jump so that caused him to crash so we all laughed our a**** off because it was a spectacular crash a** over tea cart. Of course we were laughing for different reasons I was laughing because his bike died everyone else was laughing because he crashed he never Figure it out till you got home and started tearing the engine now I'm thinking that hit broken soi think I don't know what was even funnier the fact that he didn't check the fuel first before tearing the engine down are his reaction when he found out what was in the gas tag after the fact. Anyway all of us got a real kick out of that 1 because the guy that did it he was the show off of the group he was the guy that jumped the highest jumped the furthest road the fastest and which is all 100% show off and he was the guy that showed up with all the rider gear and protective gear and the kidney Belton they owe that helmet with the double face guard on it and everything he was decked out like he wanted to turn pro so when he crashed course everybody laughed their a** off. One of the few things I do remember from my motocross days when I was like 13. I try to forget some of the other days because well let's put it this way lake evil vo I've broken a few bones crashing. There's only 2 types of bikers those that have dropped their bike and those who will and when it comes to dirt bikes it's those who have crashed and those who will and I've done both I both dropped my bike and I've crashed.
I love old transistor radios! There is something special about them which takes me back! It’s always very satisfying to get them working again and usually pretty straightforward as they’re pretty reliable on the whole!
Great! I like those little radios I had since I was about 7. I had to worry about the battery going dead, because my father wouldn't buy me a transistor battery often. (That's what they were called) It was great when he bought an AC/DC adapter. It had an attachment that connected to the radio's 9 volt battery connector.
P.S. I had a similar situation with radio dial. After fighting with it, I drilled a small hole to get to the screw. It crude, and it affects the appearance, but either that, I couldn't tighten it. The dial was loose .
I remember having these AM transistor radio's back in the early 70's and because it's all we had at the time when we go walking or riding our bikes! The worst thing was when the battery started to die it would get garbled and you would tune it just a little and would come back then fade out again! Hey remember the Ever ready 9V batteries with the cat on the 9 volt symbol! 😁
I grew up in the 60's and can remember these radios on sale, most were bought from adverts in the magazines. Whe i was 12 i made the mistake of buying a kit advertised in Practical Wireless, i followed the instructions to the letter, but apart from the slight hiss from the amplifier it didn't work. I took it to the local TV repair shop, but instead of just fixing it, they told me to call back after school and they would show me how to find the fault, this got me started wanting to learn more and they took me on as an apprentice when i left school, that was 53 years ago. The fault was a error in the instructions, they had got the 1st RF transistor the wrong way round, i always wonderd how may bulit this kit and didn't know why it was not working. You could buy job lots of these small radios as customer returns, they earned me some extra pocket money once i had learned how to repair them.
That's pretty annoying then. Did it have a schematic and a component overlay diagram of the PCB; a little reverse engineering of the board and comparing to schematic would have found the issue. However, PW should have been made aware it was wrong and printed an errata.
@@AstrosElectronicsLab It came with a circuit diagram, it was only when we checked this against the assembly instructions that the penny dropped. This was back in 1967, i did write to the company that sold the kit, but they never replied, as for PW, back then anyone could advertise in the magazine and as long as they paid, the publishers were not interested, there were little consumer protection laws back then. This was a kit sold by an advertiser, not a project in the magazine. At least it helped to start my interest in repairing consumer electronics, i spent most saturdays at the TV shop until i left school, by then i was well practiced in the art of fault finding.
This was probably the most common type of the cheap Hong Kong pocket radios. They were made from late 60s to early 80s, and sold under hundreds of different brands.
Back in the early 70's Columbia House gave you one of these when you signed up for their record club. These had those notorious dome topped transistors.
I love watching Shango do Radios like this, Nice Job I have a GE Radio model P-2710C that needs a new 9 volt thing, It got ripped out cause the Battery Back doesn't hold it shut, I need a new paper dial
There's something to be said about those old Bakelite PC boards from the 60's/70's... they were cheap with no silkscreen component overlay. Made them harder to fix, all you had to do is make one component placement mistake, and it's all over!
I don't know why that reminds me of listening to the radio station, including 840 WHAS-AM that has commentary and critics and news radio. 41:08. On the other hand, I have been using the 1979 GE 7-2705C AM radio while I am using my AM transmitter kit to listen to weather radio, and at the time, the solder connections is starting to act up the one it is connected to the transformer to produce audio to the speaker, and maybe I might try repair it and replace with the two new electrolytic capacitors to improve the signal and to keep it working again. Yes, it is made in Hong Kong, and it is what I brought it for $1, originally they're trying to sell $5, so I asked them they will take $1, and they accept it. So at this point, I tend to use as a weather radio when I need to know the weather conditions along with severe weather events.
Those leak-o-matic Duracell batteries should not be trusted. I've heard from Shango that those early black epoxy-dome transistors tend to go bad as they age. Apparently, it was just that one little 1 mFd electrolytic capacitor that needed to be changed out for that almost 60-year-old AM radio to work again, but obviously it was a good idea to replace the rest of the caps. Other than the electrolytics drying out, I don't see much in the way of failure points on these old solid-state radios that would prevent them from working pretty much forever. I suspect this radio came off of the assembly line in 1968-69.
@@richallen6764 I could be wrong but I feel that the customer was kind enough to put a new battery in it for him to use in the testing and repair of it. I. Mean the man had not used the radio in a long time and decided to pull it out and test it and the capacitors had dried out so it wouldn't work .He had to put a new battery in it to pull it out and try it out, that's probably the battery that he had put in there.
