got another clock radio - Zenith L516W (1962)
 

And finally I picked up one without a noisy clock. This is the same model radio as the first radio I ever had. About 23 years ago I was carrying it down some stairs, dropped it down the stairs and and cracked the cabinet. I've been looking for another one of these, but for some reason most of these sets seem to be AM/FM, the AM only seem much more rare. And I like that these Zeniths don't use those circuit boards which always seem to cause trouble in other clock radios from this era.

Nice find! It looks very clean inside and out.

Mine has a noisy clark & AA5. Different model though. Funny how these leetle things often don't "get it" that they're cheap-shite junk & shoulda quit workin' YEARS ago...

Already have this radio up and running. I recapped, but all that was really wrong was a bad 12BE6. I hit the dial cord with the soldering iron, and it cut it in two, so I had to replace the dial cord too. It actually works pretty good, I'm pulling in a station right now, 650 WSM, says it's out of Tennessee.

Yeah, that's the big Nashville station...

WSM is the home of the Grand Old Opry. Those little Zeniths never cease to amaze me with their ability to pull in distant stations.

I looked up WSM, says it's 50,000 watts, no wonder I could pick it up so far away. What is the most power an AM transmitter ever put out? I know that 640 KFI in Southern CA also puts out 50KW, but I don't think I've heard of a station with more.

Doc Brinkley's "Border Blasters" right over the Rio Grande supposedly cranked out a million watts...So did Powel Crosley's WLW in Cincinnati...

50Kw is the top end for AM in the U.S.

In the 1930s or thereabouts, Crosley's WLW in Cincinnati had a 500-kilowatt transmitter. It was so powerful it was lighting lamp bulbs that weren't even in sockets! Local farmers living near WLW's towers were complaining that they could not turn the lights off in their barns while the station was on the air. The FCC finally put a stop to this nonsense a few years later (I don't know exactly when; perhaps late thirties) when it capped the maximum power output for US radio stations at 50kW.

However, even today, some people living in the shadows of powerful AM and FM broadcasting stations often have real problems with the stations coming in through their telephones, televisions, even the burner coils on electric stoves. Back in the early '70s I lived just one street over from a 27.5-kW (ERP) FM radio station that came in beautifully on my FM radios (on its fundamental frequency of 92.3 MHz and between the other local stations from Cleveland), on my television set on channel 6 (the signal was so strong it didn't care that this channel's frequency range was 82-88 MHz; it blasted through anyway), and even on my dad's solid-state Ampex "Micro 88" stereo cassette tape recorder. I'll never forget one night when we were trying to record a live musical performance at our church; the tape recorder kept picking up the local FM station, and, needless to say, it all but wrecked the recording.

I had relatives who lived in a small rural town between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio (the latter being a small city some 30 miles or so south of Cleveland). There was a Cleveland radio station, 50kW, just about five miles down the road from where they lived; I remember my relatives having the devil of a time with the radio station coming in, of all places, over their telephone! The signal was strong enough that it could be heard as well at two points on the tuning dials of most radios (even the better makes with RF stages ahead of the antenna, etc.) in the area; my grandmother, who had a summer cottage there, had a small General Electric four-tube TRF clock radio that would receive that radio station at two places on the dial (fundamental frequency of 1220 kHz, and about 0.6 MHz down the dial as well, IIRC). I'm really not surprised at that, however, as TRF radios were not known for good selectivity. These radios were made for suburban and weaker signal areas where there were no extremely strong signals to cause cross-modulation and other problems. The GE set my grandmother had, as I said, was a four-tube TRF set and probably sold cheaply (with performance to match) when it was new in the late 1940s.

I don't know what ever became of that little set. My grandmother passed away in 1985, her cottage was sold, and the gentleman who bought the property promptly cleaned the place out top to bottom--including that GE TRF radio and a prewar Silvertone "curtain burner" receiver in the front room of the cottage. Had I been there before the place was sold, I probably would have tried to grab those radios before the new owner so ungraciously pitched them into the trash; however, I lived some 40 miles away at the time and didn't know the radios had been disposed of until it was far too late. :no:

Funny you should mention Doc Brinkley, Sandy. Your mention of his name reminded me of an article I read years ago in an old issue of the (now defunct) Electronics Illustrated magazine. The article told of how Doc Brinkley had a radio station in Kansas with the call sign KFKB -- Kansas First Kansas Best -- in the late '20s through about 1935. However, the station ran into very hard times in the early '30s (after all, this was during the Great Depression, when everyone had it tough) and eventually Doc Brinkley lost it. That's how the EI article's description of the station ended: " . . . In 1935 (Brinkley) lost KFKB. . . ."

The "Border Blasters" are still alive and well out West. For example, station XERB -- which actually had its studios in Los Angeles, California -- was heard very well in the Los Angeles area in the 1960s; it often carried the old Wolfman Jack radio show. Arizona has more than its share of these high-power propaganda machines as well; my friend Nolan Woodbury (a member of A/VK) once posted here that the AM radio dial in the Phoenix area is all but unlistenable after dark (Mountain Standard Time) due to the sheer numbers of border-blasters on the air in border towns between Phoenix and Mexico.

I do not think Canada has ever had "border blasters", at least none like the ones in California, Arizona and Texas, et al. Station CKLW ("The Big 8") in Windsor, Ontario -- which for years pumped out 50kW of the best top-40 radio I ever heard as a teenager growing up in the late '60s-'70s (aside from Cleveland's 50kW music machines, which I listened to as well) -- was heard well all along the southern shore of Lake Erie, from Toledo, Ohio to Buffalo, New York, and in the Detroit area, and who can ever forget WKBW-AM in Buffalo, KB-1520? That was also a 50kW station that reached southwestern Ontario, Canada and northeastern Ohio exceedingly well after dark, and had for quite a while excellent oldies music programming. The station even had a former Cleveland radio personality by the name of "Big Jack" Armstrong for a short time; then, the station switched to all talk.

Jack Armstrong passed away recently, as was reported in the Cleveland news media last year, IIRC. I don't know how old he was when he died, but I do know he was living somewhere in North Carolina (probably worked at one of the local AM stations if there were any that weren't automated, which I doubt) after leaving Buffalo and WKBW in the late 1990s.

There is a way to silence that noisy clark -- er, clock (now ya' got me doing it :D) in your Zenith radio. I read about this technique in an old radio repair book. There is a round gearbox that fits in a hole at the bottom of the clock, near the gear drive for the hands; the gearbox itself has a tiny gear that meshes with another to drive the rest of the mechanism, IIRC. Take this gearbox out and put it on top of a 100-watt light bulb. Let it set, with the bulb on, for a couple of hours, then remove the gearbox (carefully; it will be hotter than the dickens) and place a drop or two of light machine oil on the tiny drive gear. As the gearbox cools, the oil will be drawn into it. Reinstall the gearbox and your clock should be good to go, noise-free, for the next 30 years.

"Cheap-s*** junk"? Sandy, are we talking about the same Zenith? I honestly don't believe that the Zenith Radio Corporation of Chicago ever used anything other than top-quality parts (including clocks) in its radios. I once had a Zenith L516W clock radio (AM only) in which the clock was always whisper-quiet, and the radio was a fine performer as well. I foolishly stripped the chassis and clock out of the cabinet years later (long before I ever had a computer or heard of AK), and used the speaker and cabinet with one of my amateur radio sets. The only parts I saved from that radio, IIRC after all these years (!), were the tubes, which wound up in my junk box.

I didn't realize, until I read the posts in this thread, that the L516W Zenith radio was available as an AM/FM set as well as AM only. The AM/FM version must be quite rare, as I see the AM version on eBay once in a while, but I have yet to see the other one either there or on Craigslist. I wonder if the AM/FM L516W Zenith is as rare as the Zenith J420T (1952), which was a two-band (AM broadcast and shortwave) four-tube battery-powered version of the company's H511 AA5 (broadcast only), from 1951. :scratch2: The J420T doesn't show up often (in fact, very rarely) on eBay (I've only seen one such set there), and I haven't yet seen one on CL. I wonder if these sets were snapped up by collectors or--gasp!--trashed years ago. :scratch2:

I'm not sure about the model numbers, I just know that I've seen quite a few 60s plastic Zeniths that looked similar to this with the clock on the left, radio dial on the right, speaker in the center that were AM/FM, they might be a different model. I had a similar brown AM/FM Zenith clock radio a few years ago, I don't remember the model number.

I was kinda bein' facetious, Jeff. Those Zenith sets-I have 2-a white version, & a reasonably hideous green one- are kinda like GE Porta-Pot-erm, Porta-Colors. They were pretty cheap, primitive, had dreadful pictures, but they WERE "portable" COLOR TVs. And even now, 45 years (!) later, they often as not still work. I'm sure the Zenith "Clark Bars" were built to a price, but they still managed to put a lot of the "Quality" that Zenith was rightfully known for.

i have got the same radio that you have in the pictures in my bedroom & i use it every night to go to sleep with using the sleep timer. i got this clock radio 15 years ago at a yard sale & have been using it ever since.
the clock movement is dead quiet.