One of the things I kept from my Dad’s house was an old tabletop radio that had sat in the living room since the late 1970s. It hardly got used, but I rather liked the style of it. It’s an Eagle RAD 20B, in a woodgrain effect case with a big tuning dial on the front.
I’d tested it, and found it made a loud humming sound, so recently I took it apart to see if I could fix it, and to clean it.
Being in the living room since the 1970s, it had been exposed to decades of cigarette smoke. I’d cleaned it at some point in the last 10 years, so the outside wasn’t so bad, but when I opened the case up….
I put the inside of the radio on a towel and sprayed it with contact cleaner. The towel went a horrible brown colour, and later made the room smell revolting.
In old electronic equipment, faults are often caused by capacitors drying out. I replaced the smoothing capacitor on the transformer output with a new one from my spares box, and the buzzing hum went away. Great!
I made a list of all 13 capacitors in the radio, and ordered replacements for all of them. Meanwhile, to further improve the smell of the radio, I shut it in a box with some incense burning
When they’d arrived, I replaced the capacitors one at a time, testing that the radio still worked after each swap. All seemed good, though I realised I was one short and another was the wrong voltage.
Meanwhile, the power switch stopped working, and it looked tricky to remove it, so I replaced the cable with one from a table lamp that has a switch in it.
The radio has two connectors for aerials : an FM dipole and an AM/SW aerial/earth combo. I tried to find a source for these connectors, which were common on German radios of the 60s and 70s, but failed.
So I soldered two pairs of wires to these connectors, and pulled them through the slots in the back of the radio case.
When reassembling the case, the power switch started working again, but the button to choose external input from a tape recorder or record player kept catching on the case. Something’s misaligned, but I couldn’t see what was wrong.
When I got the radio setup, I found it goes silent when the tuning is at the top end of the FM band. This wasn’t the case earlier on, as shown in the video above, where it’s tuned around 105-106. I can’t tune it there now, it goes silent. A fault I’ve created somehow.
I set up a long wire AM/SW aerial up the garden and tied around a tree. The radio gets lots of short wave stations at night, which was one of the things I wanted it for.
Overall, the sound is.. a bit strange. FM, which could (and I think did) sound nice now sounds off, but I can’t easily describe it.
So… a very partial success. When the extra capacitor arrives, I shall have another look at my repairs, and I may replace some of the repairs, either with some different new capacitors that are maybe closer matched to those I took out, or maybe even put a few of the old ones back in. I’ll also put the original mains cable back in if the power switch stays working, and I’ll see what’s jamming the phono input switch.
Still, it’s all good fun, and I think it does look nice in the room now, even if it doesn’t quite work properly. But it will. Just a bit more tinkering to do.
My Shed and Other Environs 