Small and Cute Radios

[Jeffhs]

Those small tube-type Emersons, et al. may have been cute, but I don't think they lasted very long, as crowded as the chassis is. Five tubes in such a cramped space gave off a lot of heat, which could well have buckled or melted the cabinet -- to say nothing of cooking the underchassis components, many if not most of which in these small radios were underrated anyway. In a house with teenagers hooked on the local radio station, I bet these radios didn't last much longer than a year or so, if that long.

Don't forget that the crowded chassis made these sets very difficult to work on, if underchassis repairs were required. I wouldn't be surprised if these small sets were sold at dirt-cheap prices when they were new, which means few if any of them ever saw time on a repair shop service bench; if anything more serious than a bad tube went wrong with one of these sets, the chances are good the repair shop's technician told the owner the set wasn't worth fixing, and he would have been right. These little sets, as others have noted, were built cheaply to sell cheaply -- meaning, of course, that they were not worth even the charge most repair shops used to make (in the vacuum tube days) just to take the back off or to test the tubes.