Magnavox find

[EVBoy]

Nice old Magnavox from an estate sale. I wasn't going to buy it but nobody wanted it so I couldn't let it go to the dump. Weighs a ton with a beautiful wood cabinet. Works but not like it should so it will be a project.

[mhardy6647]

Looks like a field coil woofer(?).

[Urizen]

There's some nice iron underneath all of that dust.

[Sandy G]

Holy Merde' ! Think you stumbled on to somethin' NEAT !!

[cabinover]

It's a keeper! Nice little mono setup in great shape.

[cruisaire]

So, how's it sounding now? I need inspiration to get me going on mine.

[EVBoy]

Uh oh, now I'm embarrassed. It's still sitting there, untouched. Too many projects and not enough time.

Wow small world, i picked up that same unit at a flea market last weekend. I started to part it out but told myself to wait. Mine is not in good condition.
A goldmine in tubes. Especially the seeing eye tubes are about $35 a piece. I havn't even checked the year yet. but It does seem to be well built! I removed the transformers, one to use on another project but I'm going to wait and just put this thing in the attic for now!

[devoid]

I have parts here for that one. Contact me if interested.

[truetone36]

That Magnavox is from around 1947-48. They made that in several different cabinet styles. I've owned two of them over the years. That console should sound absolutely beautiful when restored.

Dumont-First with the finest in television.

[Nolan Woodbury]

Pics are small...I can't tell what bands are on that set. If it's FM, would that feature the old band?

Neat set...but I seem to prefer the horizontal arrangement. Then again, I bet that big mono will sound good once tidy.

[Jeffhs]

I agree with the others who said your console will sound great once restored. I once had a Magnavox AM/FM tuner/amp chassis which I bought at a second-hand store near my former residence. Chassis only, no speaker or cabinet. I hooked it up to an old speaker I had laying around the workshop at the time (don't remember the workaround I did to bypass the field coil), put a length of wire on the FM antenna terminal and fired it up. Worked like a champ. Those old Magnavox sets were great, built to last--like Zeniths. This chassis was likely from a console like yours, with a record changer and even a position on the function switch, IIRC, for a TV (modern FM band as well), so my unit was probably part of a three-way entertainment center circa 1948-1950 when it was new.

BTW, my best guess is your set's tuner is set up for the pre-war 42-50 MHz FM band (which would date it pre-1948), though I could be wrong. I agree with Nolan; the pictures are too small, even when supersized, to show clearly the calibration markings on the dial scale. I do know the version of this chassis with the horizontal slide-rule dial tunes the modern 88-108 MHz FM band, however, so those chassis are postwar sets. If yours has the prewar FM band, it may be possible to find a converter that will take signals from 88-108 MHz range and downconvert them to a frequency in the old band, doing all station tuning at the converter, not unlike the UHF television converters of the '50s-'60s. Regency once marketed what it called an "FM Televerter" in the '50s that downconverted the modern FM band to a TV channel; this unit worked on the same principle as the converters I mentioned for downconversion of 88-108 MHz FM to the older prewar band.

[Chad Hauris]

That's interesting that it actually has FM on the main tuner unit.
We have several of this type of set and they all were designed to use an optional FM tuner which is a completely self-contained unit with its own power supply which mounted in a pop-out panel above the main tuner unit. The main tuners on all of these we have is just AM and shortwave...none have had the optional FM tuner installed.

[radiotvnut]

I had a chassis once that had self contained FM. I have also had a couple, like chad said, that had the seperate FM tuner chassis mounted above the main tuner. I'm thinking they had two tuning eyes. One was on the main chassis and the other was on the FM chassis.