Canadian Westinghouse 99A

[maxhifi]

Seems like I am a beginner again... It's a bit of a trip working on a radio from 1930, the way the tubes are biased, the volume control design, the "parafeed" output transformer. Right now it's recapped and playing, but one or two stages draw too much current and there is distortion coming from something before the detector (signal tracer confirmed this) I got as far as I could in the living room and will have to take it to the bench. It figures that it didn`t work properly after I recapped it and returned it to its cabinet without testing, Sunday night needed to get things tidied up for the week I think one of the tubes has zero bias, but given how heavy and delicate it all is its just not convenient to troubleshoot in situ! Basically it's like a radiola 66 but with an additional RF stage, circuit wise It`s going to be awesome to bring this dinosaur back to life!

I don`t think you`ve lived until you have melted wax out of 86 year old capacitors on the barbeque! This thing makes the predicta seem designed for service.

[maxhifi]

All it needed was a new 45, because of how the bias circuit works the bad tube threw off the bias for other stages. Now after touching up the alignment this radio is hot! No antenna connected and it gets stations from 300km away no problem. Any sort of antenna will overload the radio with local stations... This thing is like a stethoscope, I wasn't expecting it to wake up so well! I experimentally adjusted the value of the tone control cap to just remove sibilants without ruining the sound quality, the original value was way too high.