1940s? Montgomery Wards "Airline" AM Radio

[vortalexfan]

Hello everyone, I'm writing you today from a cabin in the Smoky Montains of Eastern Tennesse in Pigeon Forge, TN near Dollywood.

Yesterday when I got here with my parents one of my relatives from Eastern Pennsylvania who knows I'm into restoring antique radios gave me a what I'm assuming is a late 1940s vintage Montgomery Wards "Airline" AM Only AA6 radio that is almost all original except for some of the tubes and some damage to the speaker grille and speaker, and the two mounting pins that helped hold the back cover on are missing, other than that it's in very good shape yet.

Unfortunately part of the model number sticker is missing from the back of the radio, the only part of the model number that remains is 84WG- and the rest of it is missing from there, I looked on the Beitmans site and from what I could see, the "84" dates the radio to about 1949 and the "WG" refers to who made the unit for Montgomery Wards (in this case "WG" refers to Wells-Gardner) but other than that I have no idea which model this unit is, and looking at all of the units covered by Beitman's they were all miniature tubes or miniature and octal tubes but the one I have is strictly all octal tubes of the 12V and 35V variety.

I was trying to think of the name of the website that can be used to figure out a radio's model number by its tube lineup but I can't remember the name of that website.

Any help would be appreciated.

[jr_tech]

Perhaps this?
https://grillecloth.com/sylvania/tubelist.php
jr

[vortalexfan]

Originally Posted by jr_tech

Perhaps this?
https://grillecloth.com/sylvania/tubelist.php
jr

Yes, that was what I was thinking of.

I actually remembered it right after I had posted this thread.

When I looked up on there the tube lineup, tube count and the brand it didn't come up with anything.

So I'm not sure what model I have.

Unfortunately I'm not near a computer right now or I would have looked through the Rider's index to see if anything close showed up in there.

[vortalexfan]

I finally figured out what the Radio was, its an 84WG-1804 and its from about 1950 or so. I took the chassis out of the cabinet and was expecting to see a bunch of old paper caps inside but what I actually saw was that the radio had been recapped previously in the 1960s because there were a bunch of Brown Drops with 1960 date codes on them, and a couple of Sprague "Atoms" electrolytics in the radio with a 1960 date code as well, and the radio only had 4 original paper caps left in the unit which I was able to replace with some caps I already had on hand.

I now need to repair the speaker because the original speaker cone has a bunch of tears in it, I also need to repair the grill cloth.

Other than that its in really good shape yet, and the radio is working really well yet.

[vortalexfan]

So I went to try and repair the speaker, and unfortunately the speaker ended up sounding worse after I patched the tears in the speaker so I think its too far gone to repair unfortunately. So Does anyone have a speaker like this radio uses that they could send me for the price of shipping?

Its a 4"x6" rectangular shaped speaker with only one terminal (the other voice coil wire is grounded to the speaker basket) and one of the output transformer wires is grounded to the chassis of the output transformer, and the speaker has 2 machine screw holes in the back of the magnet, that attaches the speaker to the speaker support on the radio chassis.

[vortalexfan]

OK So here's the pictures of the speaker that this radio needs.

As you can see in the pictures I tried to repair the speaker using the diluted elmers glue and coffee filter paper trick but to no avail (it actually sounded worse after the repair than before the repair.)