Philco 16/16b

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by dieseljeep

Your 2 cents worth isn't worth quite that!
The Philco 16 series is a 1935 or '36 model and a very impressive set.
A very high performance 11 tube chassis.

+1

Hundreds of feet of wire in a table radio?...Lol come on, seriously?

Those block caps are easy...With the right screw driver I can chip the guts out without heat in under a minute.



Most block cap era Philcos I only use the schematic to determine the pin-out of the ant and osc coils*. Just change the lytics, re-stuff the block caps using one of the internet references to determine their contents/pinout and if the ant and osc coils are good the chassis should work. Often the single layer ant and or osc coils are open (2 of 3 60 chassis I've serviced, and 2 of 2 80 chassis were open)...Often the break is near an end so deleting the corroded turn or two and reconnecting the end will fix it, but I've had some where the whole winding was full of opens....Those I just count the turns, remove the old and rewind the same number of turns with Radio Shack phono pickup wire (always works like a charm).

[ZenithDude88]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

+1

Hundreds of feet of wire in a table radio?...Lol come on, seriously?

Those block caps are easy...With the right screw driver I can chip the guts out without heat in under a minute.



Most block cap era Philcos I only use the schematic to determine the pin-out of the ant and osc coils*. Just change the lytics, re-stuff the block caps using one of the internet references to determine their contents/pinout and if the ant and osc coils are good the chassis should work. Often the single layer ant and or osc coils are open (2 of 3 60 chassis I've serviced, and 2 of 2 80 chassis were open)...Often the break is near an end so deleting the corroded turn or two and reconnecting the end will fix it, but I've had some where the whole winding was full of opens....Those I just count the turns, remove the old and rewind the same number of turns with Radio Shack phono pickup wire (always works like a charm).

Well some of the old radios I've worked on seemed like they had hundreds of feet of wire in them, especially when you have to replace every single wire in the unit that was chewed up by mice or the rubber insulation inside the cloth outer insulation was crumbling and exposing wire.
Actually if you count all of the hair thin copper wire in the IF cans in these old radios then yes technically these radios do have hundreds of feet of wire in them, someone on here mentioned that one of the IF cans in one of these radios has as much as 1,000 feet of wire in a single IF Transformer winding and most of these old radios had as many as 5 IF Transformers in them (especially the higher end models).
So I'm not really that far off by saying hundreds of feet of wire in an old radio, yes I agree that the interconnect wires on the underside of the radio chassis maybe doesn't amount to 100' (but close though in some of the higher end models) but like I said when you count the wire used in IF coil windings and the power transformer, and the speaker's output transformer and voice coil, then yes the radios easily can have hundreds of feet of wire in them.

[WISCOJIM]

Originally Posted by ZenithDude88

...

Good Grief!

.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

+1

Hundreds of feet of wire in a table radio?...Lol come on, seriously?

Those block caps are easy...With the right screw driver I can chip the guts out without heat in under a minute.



Most block cap era Philcos I only use the schematic to determine the pin-out of the ant and osc coils*. Just change the lytics, re-stuff the block caps using one of the internet references to determine their contents/pinout and if the ant and osc coils are good the chassis should work. Often the single layer ant and or osc coils are open (2 of 3 60 chassis I've serviced, and 2 of 2 80 chassis were open)...Often the break is near an end so deleting the corroded turn or two and reconnecting the end will fix it, but I've had some where the whole winding was full of opens....Those I just count the turns, remove the old and rewind the same number of turns with Radio Shack phono pickup wire (always works like a charm).

I talked to an old-time radio repairman, who had just finished a mid-30's Philco radio. I inquired if he replaced the bakelite block caps, He replied, that they never went bad.
I read, that they were "vacuum impregnated", so they did have a long life, but after 80+ years???
I use my $8.88 Harbor Freight heat gun and heat them a bit and the guts pop right out, with little effort.