Zenith 12-A-56 "Baby Stratosphere" found for $100

[vinyldavid]

Yet another old radio comes to the VinylDavid household.

A week ago I got a McIntosh MAC-1700 receiver from a friend who got it at a garage sale for $25. It didn't work, but that's another story. I got it working.

Anyway, the same lady who had the McIntosh MAC-1700 wanted to sell two old radios. I told my friend I was interested, and to put us in touch.

About a week and a half goes by and I get a call. The lady wants us to visit her, but I don't get off work until 8:30pm. Surprisingly, that's not too late for her. I had no money on me, but went anyway. I live about 3 miles away, and could easily run home for funds if needed.

I went to her house with my friend. The first radio was a late twenties highboy (sort of) Fada that had been refinished recently, and she wanted $100 for it, but didn't want to sell it very much, and I really wasn't interested in it anyway. I like other styles.

Then we went to the basement. My mouth dropped in amazement.

There, in the basement, was something I've wanted since I was a little boy: a Zenith blackface upright radio. Immediately I offered $75 to her price of $100.

I immediately went over to inspect it, and found it to be a higher end one (but I did not know how high end yet). Inspection revealed the tuning knob was gone, the tuning barely moves the needle, and there's a hole in the woofer. That brings me to the next point. When I turned it around, I saw with surprise that it had a tweeter! Then, I counted the tubes. 12 of them. I told her I'd give her $100, but I had to go home first.

The cabinet has many issues, missing finish, a slightly broken torch, and some serious scratches around the bottom.

Before I went to get funds, I had to get it up the stairs. My friend has to wake up at 5am for work, and as such was exhausted, and is not very strong anyway. A test-lift revealed it was within my strength, but just barely. I lifted it up one stair at a time. This was to prove to the lady I wasn't just going to leave and then come back (if I just left, she would have been able to put it out at her garage sale the next day very easily).

By the time I got it up the long flight of stairs, I was exhausted. I drove home and got $200 cash.

I drove back and handed her $100. Then she tells me that another gentleman was very interested in the radio, but did not have the funds, said he'd go get them and never came back.

What was the other $100 for, you may ask?

Also in her guest bedroom were a pair of McIntosh ML-1C speakers needing to be refoamed. I waved a pair of fifties at her, and she accepted.

I carried everything out to my Buick Roadmaster Wagon, in which the radio actually fit sideways in the cargo area, making loading the speakers very easy. By this point, the lady and I had developed a friendship, and we started talking about things. She mentioned her computer being slow, and I jumped at the chance to try and help.

I downloaded CCleaner and ran the analysis on her computer. Lots of things to remove. So I started the removal and took my now utterly exhausted friend home. I went back and it was finished. So then I ran a defrag (which had never been done on a 7 year old computer running Windows XP, yikes!). That took forever. In the meantime, she showed me her family, and we talked. A very nice lady.

Anyway, once I got done, she opened up the internet. To my shock and horror she was still using IE6! But the performance increase was there. I immediately downloaded Firefox and moved her over to it. She was ecstatic! It went from one of the most sluggish systems I had ever encountered to something that was actually relatively quick, as quick as a 1.6gHz Celeron could be. It was nice bringing some happiness to a 76 year old grandmother's life, and contact with her kids and grandkids.

So when all this was done, I had worked an 8 hour shift on a loading dock, hoisted a Baby Stratosphere up a flight of stairs, and was faced with the task of where to put them. It was 11:45 at night.

My grandmother has let me use her basement as a storage unit for a few months. A few days ago, she fell and broke her femur (she’s going to be okay, but out of the house for 5 weeks). So I headed over to her house. I pulled everything out of the Roadmaster and into the living room. I debated where to put it, but eventually decided I should just get everything down the stairs.

The 12-A-56 went first, I got it down by gently rolling it end over end with lots of support from me along the way. The McIntosh speakers (at 65lbs each) were carried by hand. That took me out. Fortunately, I could go home and sleep.

Anyway, sorry this is rambling, I’ve got a nasty cold and my head isn’t thinking in a straight line.

Here’s a pic of the Zenith:


I'll start cleaning it up and making the tuning mechanism work. All the tubes are there. Shouldn't be too hard to electrically restore, I am more concerned about the cabinet.

Here are the McIntosh speakers:

[toxcrusadr]

Dude! What a radio.

Nice job, and kudos for fixing up her computer. I wish you were closer to my mom, I'd hire you for the same thing.

You need one of these, it's well worth the investment:

http://www.harborfreight.com/materia...uck-95061.html

Inflatable tires are great for rolling over bumps in pavement and backyards. A hand truck will change your life, at least as far as hauling heavy crap around. You could even strap it into the back of the Roadmaster so it's always handy for those 'finds'.

[vinyldavid]

Here's more detailed pics of the condition...

[Sandy G]

David, I'm sure there in St Louis there are a BUNCH of furniture restorers who could get the case lookin' "Ship-Shape", & surely there's somebody there who could do the electronic restoration for you, should you decide not to fool w/it. The cabinet resto prolly wouldn't be that hard, but by the time you got all the stuff you needed to do it & if you count yr TIME as worth anything, you'd be better off getting it done. Its sort of a messy, nasty process that can take up a lot of space. As for re-doing the electronics, only YOU can determine if you feel yr level of expertise is up to tackling as complex and RARE of a set as this is.

[Jeffhs]

When I read in your post that the computer was seven years old and running Win XP, it reminded me of my own situation up to about a year and a half or two ago. From 1999 until 2010 I had an IBM "Aptiva" computer, 128mb of RAM and a 600MHz processor, that was running....now catch this...Windows 98SE, with IE6!

That computer (which was TOTL when I bought it) worked well for me, however, until 2011 or so, when an old friend of mine, who was updating his accounting firm with Windows 7 systems, gave me a more-recent vintage system (tradenamed PowerSpec, a house brand for computers marketed by Micro Center of Columbus, Ohio) running Windows XP and IE8 (though I use Firefox most of the time), the computer and operating system I'm running now. I still have the old Win98SE system, mainly because I don't want to put it out for the trash (too much sensitive information still on the hard drive). I just had my PowerSpec computer cleaned up by Microsoft technicians using remote software (they did it all over the phone), and was amazed at the amount of junk they found. No wonder the system had been running so slowly and freezing, etc. Works like new now, though.

[Phil Nelson]

Great score! This article describes how I restored my 12-A-58:

http://antiqueradio.org/Zenith12A58.htm

If you have it restored, you'll want to do it right. A sloppy refinish job, where the cabinet comes out with the wrong colors or whatever, would decrease the value to serious collectors. Ditto with the electronics.

You could easily turn a profit by selling it, and in that case I would suggest selling it as-is. Doing a total cosmetic and electronic restoration is labor-intensive, and by the time you paid people to do that, you would have invested hundreds of dollars -- perhaps enough to eat up any resale profit.

If you don't feel like tackling it all at once, one option would be to do the electronics and enjoy the radio for a while without worrying about the appearance. It's a fantastic sounding radio for its time.

You can get a reproduction of that knob here:

http://www.renovatedradios.com/parts.html

Enjoy!

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

[toxcrusadr]

A radio like that, I would be just as likely to leave the finish as is, blemishes and all. At least it's original, which means more to some collectors even with blemishes. You can't go back once you strip it.

Of course the original is sprayed lacquer, including layers of toned lacquer to even out the colors. If I was going to have someone refinish one, I'd be asking if they knew how and were willing to do that, because nothing else matches the original appearance. I've always planned to learn, and I have quite a stack of otherwise nice radios with bad or completely missing finish waiting in the wings.