Philco 624
 

Grabbed this guy off CL for a tenner :banana:

It's a farm set, so I gotta find a golf cart battery. :D

I'm planning on going through the electronics soon but the cabinet resto/refinish will have to wait for spring.

The cabinet looks shabby, but that's mostly the finish. there's a few chips/de-laminated areas, but with some carefully cut/matched chunks of walnut veneer, I should have her lookin good

You should check the vibrator power supply to see if it will function, otherwise it doesn't pay to locate a battery. The vibrator is a synchronous self rectifying type.
I also see it has a 3 volt bias cell. I would use a couple carbon-zinc penlite cells. The "C" drain is so low, it's basically shelf-life.
The tubes are filamentary tubes so the have to be a DC source. :scratch2:

Vibrator hums okay on a little 6 volt battery, either way I'm going to be retrofitting one of these https://www.pekorf.com/RadioHomePage.html and saving the mechanical one for an EMP :D

Thanks for the tip on the bias cells :thmbsp: first time I've encountered one of those before. I guess that's the only way the could get negative grid bias on a setup like this.......

I also have a synchronous Mallory Vibrapack and a dual power Navy Morale radio (async. vibrator w/ gas rectifier) around here that I've been playing with, so I'm no stranger to vibrating power supplies.

I just got done identifying all the capacitors and gouging out the bakelite blocks (3 total) so I can put together a BOM for the recap.

Youtube has a repair series on this radio. JIC

Those are quite useful. I stayed up wayyy too late watching those :yes:

I have most of the capacitors marked, I tested all the resistors, marked the outta spec ones (even out of 20% tolerance!) replacement capacitors ordered.

I still gotta mark the picofarad value caps, schematic says their mica, their appearance says they're moulded paper "mica bombs"

This is a nice radio once you get it working. An rf amp tube makes it special. A good antenna and this radio will surprise you! A really good DX queen.

This model lacks the RF amp stage unfortunately, It's the '36 model 624, not the very similar 37-624.

She lives! :banana:

I had a resistor hooked up wrong that was causing it to just play a loud hum(and the resistor getting really hot), I ended up replacing most of the original resistors trying to get it to play (all the voltages were way off anyway, and I had some filaments not lighting)

Now I just have vibrator hash to quiet

and yes I scored a golf cart battery :thmbsp:

Very, very nice. Good show! Another one lives again. I should live so long.

Did you reinstall all the covers on the power supply, If not, you'll get a lot of hash radiated into the signal.