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As I type tonight I am listening to a 1936 Crosley “Tombstone” chassis model 6H6 six tube radio produced in 1936, 82 years ago, but nonetheless producing sound from my modern and humble radio station. It is one of the few things I own which is older than I (I have a 1898 gold piece). I bought it at an auction when I was a teenybopper for 25 cents, such a bargain price since it wasn’t working. A resistor replacement remedied this and it was rockin’ and rollin’ again.
This year I preemptively recapped and generally recondition the radio and all the original tubes test good and it works great. A big myth back in the day was that if anything went wrong with a radio it was due to a bad tube…definitely not true in my experience. Tubes rarely failed unless something else went bad, usually capacitors which were leaky and took out the tubes and transformers as a result. In many cases the tubes were bad but this was because of another component failure and unless corrected the tubes went bad again in a few weeks. I could have made much money replacing tubes but my goal was no repeat customers for the same failure and I did it right. My success was not having the same failure again…that sounds funny, even silly doesn’t it.
I couldn’t help but notice, while playing some moldy oldies from the 50’s and 60’s that the bass is “tight”. This radio has a 6 inch speaker which includes a wound field magnet which serves the dual purpose of providing a magnetic field for the voice coil reaction as well as being the filter choke for the B+ supply. It is driven by a single tube power amplifier in Class A mode. Whoever designed this knew about proper speaker damping. The bass is really solid, producing a thud rather than a boing. Sounds great and none of my solid state radios please me as much as this one with their sound.
Modern radios which I have experienced neither match the aesthetics of wood veneer cabinets, warm red hot glowing and smelling stuff in the back, nor the warm sound this produces. Shame. It is not really hi-fi but still it is pleasing to my ears.
Just a little walk back into the “good ole days” for me and I hope for some of you.
Neil
I really love those old radios.
It’s the good old days for me too. This is the one I grew up listening on.
Repair Challenges
Like many I grew up in front of floor model radios that were taller than I was at the start.
That solid thump of the bass and clarity of sound was one of their distinctions, along with possibly adding a bit of heat to the room in winter time.
For a short time in the 1900’s I took in several older radios with intentions of restoring them for a collector, but lack of space made it impractical since the radios were large and our work space in the house is small.
A particular difficulty for me was figuring out how to neatly and completely remove defective caps and resistors because of the leads being looped around the terminal connections then soldered. It seemed unavoidable to add replacement parts on top of clipped wire wrapped around binding posts in clumps of solder.
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