Quote:
Originally Posted by Electronic M
That isn't a bad price given cabinet condition assuming all the tubes are correct types and most aren't bad.
TRF sets vary from a walk in the park to an endless hunt for unobtainium. If all that's bad is a tube or two, some caps and maybe a fixed resistor or 5 TRFs are simple and easy....but if a transformer is bad on a 20s set it can be very difficult to impossible to find one and if you don't have the engineering skills (or are stuck on exact replacement for originality) to figure out a non-correct but functional replacement your going to be stuck with a paper weight. Some sets have goofy problems like potmetal chassis that crack and shatter and are irrepairable (I had a radiola 44/46 like that).
On the rare occasion I accept a set like that for repair I tell the owner "I'm going to try to verify the continuity of the coils and make sure it's repairable before I work on it. If its missing something I can't get I'm returning it as is and not fixing it. If I don't find anything wrong but can't fix it I'm going to waive my labor charge collect the cost of the installed parts, and return it to you as is". If they know there is no guarantee it is repairable going in that generally prevents troublesome levels of dissapointment on occasional unfixable patients.
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Ok, thanks for the info, from what I can see in the pictures, the tubes look like they're all there and accounted for, the cabinet looks pristine and so does the speaker cabinet. I'll let you know what I find out if I end up getting it. I do have some of the tubes that this radio uses in my tube stash already, including several known good 80 rectifier tubes and a NOS RCA 26 tube.
I've seen several YouTube videos posted by someone with the username Glasslinger who does nothing but restore old TRF sets from the 1920s and it seems like all he ever has to do to them is just clean them and maybe replace the fixed resistor (the one that fits into a socket similar to a fuse socket) and maybe change out a tube or two, other than that they seem to come to life with very little work done to them (grant it the ones he works on are battery units rather than AC units like this one is).
Anyways thanks for the feedback.