Newest Aquisition..Zenith Royal 755

[stereofisher]

Got this radio off the 'Bay for a $19. Wanted a leather cased radio and this looked good. Someone got inside it and bent the fins on the tuner. Have not straighten one in a long time. Over 30 years. It played on the high channels only. Since I like AM 740 out of Toronto Canada, I set out straightening the tuner fins. Got it to work from 700 to 1600 KC. Tried to get it to work below this and made it worse. Took an hour to get it back to what I had improved it to. Its very sensitive. I live here in Southeast NY. It gets a lot of stations. Three stations I listen to are AM 740 in Canada,1520 WKBW in Buffalo and WCBS Newsradio 88. It brings me to my sell imposed limit of 5 radios pictured. All work. Almost as fun as my stereo stuff Eric

[Celt]

Nice. I used to have a mint Zenith AM-FM portable that I had since the 60's. Made the mistake of taking it to a picnic once and some fool ran off with it.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by stereofisher

Got this radio off the 'Bay for a $19. Wanted a leather cased radio and this looked good. Someone got inside it and bent the fins on the tuner. Have not straighten one in a long time. Over 30 years. It played on the high channels only. Since I like AM 740 out of Toronto Canada, I set out straightening the tuner fins. Got it to work from 700 to 1600 KC. Tried to get it to work below this and made it worse. Took an hour to get it back to what I had improved it to. Its very sensitive. I live here in Southeast NY. It gets a lot of stations. Three stations I listen to are AM 740 in Canada,1520 WKBW in Buffalo and WCBS Newsradio 88. It brings me to my sell imposed limit of 5 radios pictured. All work. Almost as fun as my stereo stuff Eric

I know what you mean about those older Zenith radios; they are built like tanks and are sensitive as all get-out. The original Zenith Radio Corp. of Chicago really knew their stuff (even into the '80s--my R70 and H480 were built then and work wonderfully--in fact, the R70 gets AM 740 better than any of the others except the TO); unfortunately, not so with LG and its Zenith-branded TVs. I have several here, two transistor portables (Royal 1000-1 TO and R-70 AM/FM), one AM/FM/FM-stereo clock radio (H480-W) and two tube sets (K731 and H511). All work well (BTW, I like AM 740 in Toronto as well, so all my vintage sets are tuned to that station), but the dial cord broke long ago in the H511 and just recently in my T/O 1000. I'm not looking forward to restringing the dial of the latter, as it looks like the set uses two dial cords (the one which drives the dial pointer and tuning capacitor is the one that seems to have snapped). It won't be easy getting the chassis out of the cabinet, either. I have the service manual and schematic, but it looks like it's going to be a big job and, to be perfectly honest, I don't know where to start. I guess I'll have to study the exploded views of the chassis and so forth before I begin this project so I don't wind up removing the wrong fasteners, making things worse than they were before I started.

BTW, your experiences with getting proper tracking across the dial of your Royal 755 remind me of a similar problem I'm having with my Royal 1000. My set works, and very well, all across the dial, but the only way I can get the dial pointer to land on the proper frequencies is to fiddle with the oscillator trimmers on the chassis. (I am trying to set the oscillator trimmers by ear, as I do not have an alignment generator--which probably explains why I'm having so much trouble getting the tracking right.) The problem is, I can get it correct at one end of the dial or the other, but not both; for example, I can get the tracking right from about 550 to 1100 kHz, but then the dial is off from 1100 to 1600, and vice-versa. Now that the dial cord is broken, however, I have to put the tracking adjustments aside until I can restring that cord! Oh, well. That's part of what makes working with these old radios so much fun. The repair jobs can be time-consuming, but when they are done and that old radio is working as it did when new, the effort is worth it. Case in point: Thirty-five years or so ago, I had an old (1963 model) Zenith TV I had rescued from the curb in my hometown. Someone had filched all the tubes except the CRT and the HV rectifier. I replaced the missing tubes and was rewarded, some weeks later, by a characteristically sharp and clear Zenith picture on all three (at the time) network TV channels in Cleveland. I brought several other old sets, radios as well as TVs, to life this way as well (not necessarily by replacing filched tubes), including a 1949 Zenith table model AM/FM radio, a thrift-store find in the '70s, that turned out to have nothing wrong with it except a blown fusible resistor under the chassis. I replaced this part, plugged the radio in, threw the switch--and it worked, extremely well, for a set made 30 years ago (from the date of its manufacture). I got rid of it a couple years later; why, I don't remember anymore. I wish I would have kept it though, as this set was probably one of Zenith's better smaller late-'40s table models. My K731, however, probably works and sounds better than many if not most bakelite-cased sets, thanks to its heavy walnut cabinet and two-way speaker system. The nice thing about that K731 is I didn't have to do a darn thing to it when it arrived here after I won the auction; I just plugged it in and enjoyed it, as I've been doing ever since. Now, if only there was more interesting or better-sounding programming on radio these days . . .

AM 740 in Toronto is an excellent music station that comes in very well here all the time (I live about a mile from the south shore of Lake Erie, so can hear that station, CKLW and WJR from Detroit, and most other major Detroit AMs; in the summer my FM dial (even on my stereo, and its FM tuner isn't very sensitive) just lights up with stations from southwestern Ontario, Canada and Detroit, as well as all Cleveland stations, of course). A Cleveland station, WERE 1300, is basically a local talk station, but it has a nice music program weekday afternoons, proving that there are still music stations on AM in North America and Canada; it just takes some looking to find them amid the sea of 50kW talk stations in or near most big cities, as in many cases the music stations are small semi-local operations (less than 50kW). AM 740 is an exception. It has a potent 50kW signal that covers the Toronto area and much of the northeastern United States. As most of the smaller Cleveland AMs turn their signal patterns away from my area at night, and the only other Cleveland stations with signals good enough to listen to are 50kW talk outlets, AM 740, and likely other music stations I have yet to find, continue to prove to me that good music on AM isn't dead yet--far from it.

I can also get 1520 WKBW here at night, and like the station a lot, as it plays all the oldies that were top-40 when I was growing up. There is a so-called "oldies" station in Cleveland that cannot hold a candle to KB1520; the reason is the Cleveland station only plays 1960s-1970s music most of the time, although it has a '50s "Jukebox Saturday Night" program on Saturday evenings and a syndicated oldies program on Sunday nights until midnight called Goddard's Gold. But as I said, the only so-called "oldies" FM in Cleveland is no match for KB1520; I honestly don't think there are many AM or FM oldies stations in this country with anywhere near the history KB1520 has had. Time was when most 50kW AM stations belted out top-40--I remember many of them: WNBC 660, WABC 770 New York, WLS 890, WMAQ 670, WBBM 780, WCFL 1000 Chicago, WKYC 1100, WIXY 1260, WGAR 1220, WELW 1330, WPVL 1460, et al. in Cleveland and so forth. Most of these stations have changed owners, formats and call signs over the years; in fact, every one of the stations I listed are now talk or news-talk, with new call signs in almost every case. WMAQ Chicago went through several different formats before it was sold from NBC in 1986. It is now sports-talk WSCR. A former music station in Cleveland is also a 50kW sports-talk outlet with calls WKNR 850. WKYC 1100, also 50kW, was a powerhouse rock station from 1965 to 1972; it has since returned to its heritage calls WTAM. I cannot abide its programming, though, as it is now news-talk with Rush Limbaugh, etc. in the afternoons and a loudmouth talk host immediately following. If the truth be known, I'd rather listen to my own music CDs or Internet radio/digital cable music channels than much or most of the stuff that passes for radio programming these days. Corporate greed has ruined many once great AM radio stations, including, I am sorry to say, the legendary 700 WLW in Cincinnati. This station has an interesting story to tell about its early days (the 1930s), when it had a 500kW transmitter that lit up light bulbs--even bulbs not installed in lamps or in lamps not even plugged in or turned on--in farmhouses near the towers. Must have driven those folks nuts when they found they couldn't turn their lights off until WLW signed off!

Corporate greed of the worst sort has also made a shambles, IMHO, of a small AM station about 20 miles west of here. This was WELW 1330 in suburban Cleveland, which for several years had an all-oldies format modeled after the former oldies format of CKLW in Detroit (which itself is now a talk station). However, about two and a half years ago, IIRC, the owners of WELW 1330 decided they could make more money if the station were a talk operation, like the big 50kW flamethrowers in Cleveland. To make a long story short, the owners eventually threw out the oldies format, including two well-known former Cleveland oldies disk jockeys (who worked for the "oldies" station in Cleveland previous to this), and promptly replaced it and them with syndicated talk. The only way I can hear that station at my present residence these days is on Comcast channel 99 (the station's signal was not meant to reach this far east of Cleveland, especially at night), but since I don't care for their programming since they dumped the oldies, it's no loss to me at all.