Weird Question

[Philcofan42]

I have a Silvertone R1171 that I paid a whopping $7.00 for. I was planning on doing a recap to get it working and asked my brother-in-law to take a look at the cabinet since he's pretty handy woodworking wise. He feels the cabinet is too far gone to refinish. Delamination can be reglued, but there are areas where the wood has split and shrunk from water damage. He would like to build a replica cabinet from scratch. Is a Sears catalog radio like this even worth bothering with? The recap doesn't look too tough, but I'm going to have to knock a fair amount of corrosion off the chassis while I'm at it. I'm trying to decide if I should try and fix up the original cabinet as best I can, let him build me a new one or just scrap the whole thing and move on to the 1956 Zenith am/fm that's waiting it's turn. Any advice or thoughts would be great!

Thanks,
Dan