The radio in "as found" condition

This Philco is really pretty pathetic looking. I picked this one up for $15 at a junk shop, to use as practice for repair. I wanted something to practice on that wasn't terribly rare, and that I wouldn't feel bad about messing up. These sets seem to be pretty common, I see them for sale on E-bay quite often. The radio had a very loud hum when purchased, a sure sign of bad filter capacitors. The radio is constructed of ivory painted bakelite, which is badly chipped and scratched, as you can see in the picture. The plastic dial cover is in great shape, as are the knobs. The back of the radio is missing. The antenna attaches to the inside of the radio cabinet, as opposed to the back, so the missing back is not a huge issue.

Cabinet Restoration

This radio is an ivory painted bakelite, and it has quite a few chips in the paint (obviously). This one will probably get stripped with a chemical stripper at some point, and then I'll try my hand at repainting it.

I began the cabinet restoration by stripping the radio with Citri-Strip, a gelled stripper. This required a lot of work. It took several applications, as well as scrubbing and lots of work on the louvers to get all of the paint off. In the future, I think I will just sand down the areas where chips are located, and then repaint. Once the cabinet was stripped, I could see that the radio was actually a black bakelite, which was then factory painted ivory. Also more evident were two thin stress cracks which were located on one side of the radio.

Fixing cracks with glazing putty

After painting the top

The cracks were extremely tight, and I thought that simply repainting the radio might be enough to cover them up. However, I decided that I should try and fix the cracks as best as possible before actually painting the radio. With that in mind, I covered the cracked areas with a thin coat of glazing putty. Glazing putty is used on automobiles to cover areas where you may have fixed rust, lost a paint chip, etc. Once the putty was dry, I sanded it down so that the repair was smooth to the touch. The radio was now ready to be painted. I decided to use a method which was described on the Antique Radios Online page. The article can be found by following this link.

Essentially, you paint each surface of the radio separately, the sand and rub out the finish to complete the radio. I used Navajo White paint from Ace Hardware, which seemed to be a close match to what the radio would have looked like when new. On the upper right is a picture of the top of the radio just after painting the top.

The finished radio

On the left is a picture of the completed radio. As you can see, it turned out pretty well! It looks much better than the chipped up and cracked cabinet from before. I do feel that repainting is only an option on radios that are beyond help. An original, unaltered paint job is much more authentic and valuable than a repainted radio. The cabinet restoration of this radio provided valuable experience for repainting other bakelite radios.

Electronic Restoration

When purchased, the radio emitted only a loud hum - a sure sign of shorted or dead electrolytic capacitors. I ordered some replacements from Antique Electronic Supply, and also ordered replacements for all the paper capacitors in the radio. This was one of the first radios I recapped, so for practice I went ahead and did all the capacitors, one at a time. After completing the re-cap, the radio seemed to power on fine, but I could not receive any stations. The loud hum was gone. I wasn't sure what else could be wrong. I tested all the tubes, and they seemed fine. While talking to my father on the phone, I mentioned that I couldn't pull in any stations on this particular project. He asked if there was an antenna attached. Well, this radio comes with an internal antenna that should have been plenty sufficient to pull in any of the local AM stations. However, when I examined the radio further, I could see that the connection between the antenna and the tuning capacitor was loose. I dropped a bead of solder onto the connection, and presto! The radio worked perfectly.

Final Thoughts..

This was a great project. While this radio is probably only worth $30, I ended up investing much more time and effort into it than that. That's ok, though, because it taught me several valuable lessons on how to repair and repaint bakelite cases, as well as replace capacitors.