1939 Silvertone FARM RADIO! AHHH!!

[Tubejunke]

After over 30 years of messing with old radios and avoiding farm radios, one finally landed in my living room via the girlfriend's latest thrift store raid. It's a 1939 Silvertone clearly marked model 6050 6051 which if you use to look up info. or pictures on the WWW will show you data on a 1946 model that is much better looking and plugs into the wall. Silvertone had a really crazy way of cataloging their models. For instance, this is really a Silvertone Order= 57K 6050 Ch= 101.503-1. Go figure!

So, I now have a girlfriend gift that requires separate 4.5 and 67.5 VDC power to operate. Now if someone were really into playing with what amounts to a number of ways of approaching designing the circuits to provide this power, this would be an excellent project. And frankly I'm hoping that person is here reading this as I would like to see it find a BETTER home! LOL!

If it were more of an eye catcher, I may take the leap into these old things, but if you can see much in the little picture I attached you may agree that it is sort of a misshapen design. It is in really nice shape; I must give it that much credit. The dial has a pretty badly worn spot on one side where I guess all of the local stations of the time in whatever area were at.

Of all the ideas for powering these things I have seen, the best seems to be making an AC based permanent supply as opposed to bundling store bought batteries to achieve the voltages needed. Again, it needs a BETTER home owned by someone who enjoys these things and has a battery eliminator. For me none of the options are really cost effective to power an AM radio.

Does anyone here collect farm radios? I guess it fits in with the old breadboard crowd, but the old 20s stuff at least bears the uniqueness of obvious antiquity. Any thoughts?