Help identifying a radio

[Aaron H]

Would any of you fellas happen to know what model number this radio is? The tag on the back of it has corroded away to almost nothing. All I can make out is that it's a General Electric, and at the bottom of the tag I can read CX 14202. Did try researching that number, but to no avail. I'm hoping I can find some service literature on it so I can restring all of the dials on it. Thank you all in advance for any insight!

[sean]

Climax ME17. The service literature is available here:

http://www.nostalgiaair.org/pagesbym...1/M0002771.pdf

Unfortunately it does not have dial stringing information.

[Aaron H]

Thank you for writing back, Sean, and for posting a link to the service information. I'm going to have to buy the actual book because the print in the PDF is too blurry, but that's not a problem.

So, was Climax a part of GE or vice versa at one point? The General Electric on the tag is somewhat confusing.

Going though the set, I found 3 bad tubes.....and by bad I mean open cathodes/heaters. One of the bad tubes is the 6U5 magic eye tube......why in hell are those so damned expensive? There are so many of them on various venues, both new and good used....they're certainly not rare.

[sean]

Hi Aaron,

Those were pretty standard patent / licensing plates at the time. You can see the remnants of the mention of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) on it also. RCA and GE owned many of the radio patents at the time and a company had to get a license from them to use those patents to build radios.

It's unusual to have burned out filaments on 6V tubes. Maybe someone stuffed bad tubes in the set before you got it. The 6U5 has been an expensive tube for quite some time. It isn't needed for the operation of the radio but it does add to the aesthetic appeal.

You might try this version of the schematic. It's slightly better but still not great.

https://www.tubesandmore.com/sites/d...c_me_pg8-1.png

[Dave A]

Here is my thread on my Climax from 2013. The website mentioned in no longer around.

http://videokarma.org/showthread.php...ghlight=climax

[Kevin Kuehn]

Aaron ,

Try this, looks very clear when I click and zoom in. Otherwise I could email you the high resolution grayscale scan. Better save it because it wont stay on my Flickr page long. That's a nice looking radio.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/152661...posted-public/

[Electronic M]

The 6U5/6E5 is fairly rare to find with decent brightness anywhere but online (almost anything rare can be found online) and from tube vendors that buy bulk lots.

One workaround is to get a 1629 make a socket adapter and put a voltage doubler circuit in it's heater path.