Thread: My 1930s Farm Shop (2)

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Well I thought I could live with the old record player sitting in the Arizona room as a non-working display piece..........you'd think at 66 I know myself a bit better



I picked up the schematics so I got radio out of the cabinet and found I really didn't have the patience and eyesight anymore to do this kind of work. Fortunately my good friend Dave (69Bee) does and was kind enough to work on it for me. He determined that all that was wrong with the original radio was a hand full of resistors and capacitors. After waiting on parts to get in he had the radio back up and running again.



I had spent some time working a bit more on the turntable while Dave was doing the radio so everything was ready to reassemble when Dave got the radio chassis back to me. I got everything back together and while the radio worked the way it should, but when I tried the turntable no sound.


I narrowed that down to being the pickup cartridge in the tone arm. Seems the cartridge used in the record player is a crystal type, and the crystal happens to be a salt crystal . Yeah, who da thought a 70 year old salt crystal would have broken down after sitting in an attic in 120 degree temperatures and 90+ percent humidity in the summer and close to freezing and almost no humidity in the winter.



Astatic L 92 by M Patterson, on Flickr




Long story short there is a guy in Ohio that can actually rebuild these cartridges so off it went. It came back the other day and I got everything back together. The radio has a lot of static, but I suspect that has more to do with outside interference than the radio itself (it didn't have it when Dave was working on it) and I only get 2 AM stations where I live at anyway. The record player could probably also use a new needle and I'm keeping an eye out for one of those.


https://youtu.be/pqZ9VAu0sbc


It will sit around now and probably get plugged in once a year or so while it waits to get passed on to the next generation.


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Make sure the tynes aren't bent on the variable tuning capacitor and you might have to string an outside antenna.