I bought one of these last month and it was already restored. Nice radio. I love the flip up/down on/off. I show it to people and they can’t believe it’s 72 years old. Thanks for the video.
"if it ain"t broke, don't fix it"..learned that years ago from my shop teacher. I have the same radio like new. works perfectly.alignment right on.super sensitive.great for dx'ing especially at night. Zenith was always top shelf......
When I was a kid, I used to walk out to the City Dump, which at that time was a huge pit some 14 feet deep in the shape of a V. Me and my best buddy would go out to see what good things we could find, I always picked up old radios and other sort of electric things, there were not a lot of other type things, one of my best finds was a large box filled with butcher knives from a local meat packing plant that went out of business, oh and for young boys as we were, our local old doc threw out his medical books, man we got an education from looking at the old black and white plates in that book. I still have some of those knives they were top quality. I gave them to my folks and got them back when mom entered the nursing home and I had to dispose of her property and sell her home. So once fine afternoon, I brought back an old radio chase and one in a cabinet. The full one worked when I turned it on and to my joy had a jack so I could plug in the old 45 RPM record changer deck that I had found earlier. The chase one I wired up and plugged into the wall, it was not working well at all, now I am sure it was the capacitors as it had a hell of a hmmmmm from what I recall. Not being all that familiar with the workings of radios, I took a screwdriver and began shorting things out to see if it would stop humming. When I shorted across that damn rectifier it blew! Man the stench was horrid, my folks left the house to get away from it. Dad told me to open all the windows and let the house air out and this was in a 5 bedroom two story home. It was then that I stopped shorting things out and began just tearing them apart and saving the resistors and capacitors and such. I used to unroll the old paper/foil caps after carving the wax off with my pocket knife. I found them interesting and one day decorated my room by stringing those foils from wall to wall. I sort of wish I had some of that old stuff but when I wed and joined the US Army so my kids could be paid for when they came along, my folks moved to a small house in town with plumbing cause mom was in a horrible car wreck the results of she still wears a leg brace to walk at 95 years of age. My stuff was left in the old house which was sold as is and later torn down. Now a gravel yard sits where it once stood. Sad really.
On one of our dump ground raids, as we used to call them back in the mid 60's I found a radio built sort of like that, with the pop up display but it was in a sort of olive drab early thick plastic or something like that. It was an early rechargeable set with a sealed wet cell 6 volt battery inside. It had two pull up antenna's that were like steel tape, and had multi shortwave as well as AM on the dial. I had it working and we took it with us when, after a quiet little wedding in the church atop the hill on the same Saturday as Woodstock was happening some 1500 miles East of us, and the LAPD was searching for Charles Manson and his family 1600 miles west of us, I married the love of my life. We would stay together till last year when cancer claimed my bride of 51 years and 4 days. At any rate we moved to Minnesota where work was plentiful and I got a job pumping fuel at a truck stop, my wife worked next door at the café serving trucker their coffee and such. Really the truck stop was a Standard Oil Truck Plaza with rental showers and bunkhouse rooms available to trucker. The café was known as the best place to eat between the Twin Cities and Rochester on the only straight highway between the two major cities in that State. So one day I took that radio to work to show a buddy who worked there, an older fellow from Texas, who was of course, called Tex. He fell in love with the radio and talked me out of it. If I recall he gave me 20 bucks for it, and in 1969 that was good money! He knew more about radios then I did, and brought it in a few weeks later to show me that he had revived the battery and had it working without being plugged in. I had never been able to get that to work. Strange how one mans trash is a young mans treasure and toy. Man I still long for those days, when I was so young and so blind to the horrors that this world can produce. I guess old men often dream of yesteryear and these videos help to bring back those memories. Thank you so very much for producing them they keep my aging mind active and give me pause to remember those days..
I did one of these a few years back and my filter cap was completely blown. I wound up stuffing the original filter cap with new ones. Seemed like there was no where else to put them. Great video.
Thank you for your video! I just happened to pick up this same model recently and haven’t had a chance to open it up. I was already thinking about replacing the selenium rectifier, nice to see what you did there...
I always love to see those old batteries, I have a few of them that I just display to historic value. I have even gone as far as creating my own battery reproduction, scanning the battery and going a mockup graphic on card paper then cutting it out of white donut or cake boxes, it works well for design. For the battery power itself, I use lithium cells ripped out of old portable drill battery packs, there's enough room to mockup enough lithium cells to get the voltages needed and room to spare for a built in charger. Fun stuff!
Nice to see you back, and another successful rescue. I have a couple of AC/DC radios to work on this winter myself, a Crosley 11-305U (Ebony) and a Sears Silvertone 132880. I plan on putting together a kit, or similar, for a replacement battery and possibly a replacement AC power supply as well (I don't like the excessive voltage drop on the Crosely; things got toasty in that one). On a related note, I recently put a kit together for replacing 3/4" IF transformers, kind of a core replacement. I was meaning to ask if you wanted one (on the house) to look at. I put it together as a side project for one radio I had where someone destroyed the powdered slugs and twisted the entire 1/4" tube assembly snapping all of the wires inside. Since the kit is a PCB design, I made a few more for other restorers in the same predicament. Cheers and thanks for posting this. - Eddy
You're right the battery probably has a premium to collectors and repro battery makers. It has the 2 digit zip code for Chicago which came into effect for big cities in 1943. The five digit code didn't come into effect till 1963 so it was made between those years with a little overlap into the 60's till new battery cases were printed. Yes Zenith always made good stuff back then.
This Zenith is !!→RARE←!! Most of the radios which I've "awakened", have been either Zenith, or Motorola. (I've been a Motorola Two-Way comm dealer since '77; most of those consumer radios, were carried in because the customer was unaware the three different corporate divisions were/are at play. Including this radio in the 'count', this is the second one I've seen....
Great to see you back. I have the Bakelite version of that radio,it's got more cracks than Humpty Dumpty Sorry if the spelling is off. I Liked,Shared,Added to playlists. All my best.
One thing I always wonder when you and others replace one of those stinking rectifiers with silicon. What would happen if you replaced it with not one diode, but with 4 built into a bridge rectifier. Would that not drop more voltage and yield a much quieter DC power supply for the set? Or would this have some detrimental effect on the set?
@@45AMT You would most likely be spot on if an idiot (that being me) had not wired the automatic gain control circuit backwards after replacing an output transformer. Got the leads flipped and the squeal went away. Thank you for your input :)
@@johnneybot9542 Actually I'm not. I was just wondering why you bother to take time out of your day to leave such an uneducated comment with poor grammar.
I bought one of these last month and it was already restored. Nice radio. I love the flip up/down on/off. I show it to people and they can’t believe it’s 72 years old. Thanks for the video.
I always liked this design by Zenith. Glad you got working like new.
"if it ain"t broke, don't fix it"..learned that years ago from my shop teacher. I have the same radio like new. works perfectly.alignment right on.super sensitive.great for dx'ing especially at night. Zenith was always top shelf......
When I was a kid, I used to walk out to the City Dump, which at that time was a huge pit some 14 feet deep in the shape of a V. Me and my best buddy would go out to see what good things we could find, I always picked up old radios and other sort of electric things, there were not a lot of other type things, one of my best finds was a large box filled with butcher knives from a local meat packing plant that went out of business, oh and for young boys as we were, our local old doc threw out his medical books, man we got an education from looking at the old black and white plates in that book. I still have some of those knives they were top quality. I gave them to my folks and got them back when mom entered the nursing home and I had to dispose of her property and sell her home. So once fine afternoon, I brought back an old radio chase and one in a cabinet. The full one worked when I turned it on and to my joy had a jack so I could plug in the old 45 RPM record changer deck that I had found earlier. The chase one I wired up and plugged into the wall, it was not working well at all, now I am sure it was the capacitors as it had a hell of a hmmmmm from what I recall. Not being all that familiar with the workings of radios, I took a screwdriver and began shorting things out to see if it would stop humming. When I shorted across that damn rectifier it blew! Man the stench was horrid, my folks left the house to get away from it. Dad told me to open all the windows and let the house air out and this was in a 5 bedroom two story home. It was then that I stopped shorting things out and began just tearing them apart and saving the resistors and capacitors and such. I used to unroll the old paper/foil caps after carving the wax off with my pocket knife. I found them interesting and one day decorated my room by stringing those foils from wall to wall. I sort of wish I had some of that old stuff but when I wed and joined the US Army so my kids could be paid for when they came along, my folks moved to a small house in town with plumbing cause mom was in a horrible car wreck the results of she still wears a leg brace to walk at 95 years of age. My stuff was left in the old house which was sold as is and later torn down. Now a gravel yard sits where it once stood. Sad really.
On one of our dump ground raids, as we used to call them back in the mid 60's I found a radio built sort of like that, with the pop up display but it was in a sort of olive drab early thick plastic or something like that. It was an early rechargeable set with a sealed wet cell 6 volt battery inside. It had two pull up antenna's that were like steel tape, and had multi shortwave as well as AM on the dial. I had it working and we took it with us when, after a quiet little wedding in the church atop the hill on the same Saturday as Woodstock was happening some 1500 miles East of us, and the LAPD was searching for Charles Manson and his family 1600 miles west of us, I married the love of my life. We would stay together till last year when cancer claimed my bride of 51 years and 4 days. At any rate we moved to Minnesota where work was plentiful and I got a job pumping fuel at a truck stop, my wife worked next door at the café serving trucker their coffee and such. Really the truck stop was a Standard Oil Truck Plaza with rental showers and bunkhouse rooms available to trucker. The café was known as the best place to eat between the Twin Cities and Rochester on the only straight highway between the two major cities in that State. So one day I took that radio to work to show a buddy who worked there, an older fellow from Texas, who was of course, called Tex. He fell in love with the radio and talked me out of it. If I recall he gave me 20 bucks for it, and in 1969 that was good money! He knew more about radios then I did, and brought it in a few weeks later to show me that he had revived the battery and had it working without being plugged in. I had never been able to get that to work. Strange how one mans trash is a young mans treasure and toy. Man I still long for those days, when I was so young and so blind to the horrors that this world can produce. I guess old men often dream of yesteryear and these videos help to bring back those memories. Thank you so very much for producing them they keep my aging mind active and give me pause to remember those days..
I did one of these a few years back and my filter cap was completely blown. I wound up stuffing the original filter cap with new ones. Seemed like there was no where else to put them. Great video.
Thank you for your video! I just happened to pick up this same model recently and haven’t had a chance to open it up. I was already thinking about replacing the selenium rectifier, nice to see what you did there...
I always love to see those old batteries, I have a few of them that I just display to historic value. I have even gone as far as creating my own battery reproduction, scanning the battery and going a mockup graphic on card paper then cutting it out of white donut or cake boxes, it works well for design. For the battery power itself, I use lithium cells ripped out of old portable drill battery packs, there's enough room to mockup enough lithium cells to get the voltages needed and room to spare for a built in charger. Fun stuff!
Nice to see you back, and another successful rescue.
I have a couple of AC/DC radios to work on this winter myself, a Crosley 11-305U (Ebony) and a Sears Silvertone 132880.
I plan on putting together a kit, or similar, for a replacement battery and possibly a replacement AC power supply as well (I don't like the excessive voltage drop on the Crosely; things got toasty in that one).
On a related note, I recently put a kit together for replacing 3/4" IF transformers, kind of a core replacement. I was meaning to ask if you wanted one (on the house) to look at. I put it together as a side project for one radio I had where someone destroyed the powdered slugs and twisted the entire 1/4" tube assembly snapping all of the wires inside. Since the kit is a PCB design, I made a few more for other restorers in the same predicament.
Cheers and thanks for posting this.
- Eddy
I like those old Crosely's and Silvertone's. Have fun with those!
You're right the battery probably has a premium to collectors and repro battery makers. It has the 2 digit zip code for Chicago which came into effect for big cities in 1943. The five digit code didn't come into effect till 1963 so it was made between those years with a little overlap into the 60's till new battery cases were printed. Yes Zenith always made good stuff back then.
Been a while. SO hope to see more videos from you in the near future!!!!
Thumbs Up, Great effort on you're part, You Rock, Lets Go Brand..
Radio Resuce Time, you little beauty. Been missing your content
This Zenith is !!→RARE←!! Most of the radios which I've "awakened", have been either Zenith, or Motorola. (I've been a Motorola Two-Way comm dealer since '77; most of those consumer radios, were carried in because the customer was unaware the three different corporate divisions were/are at play. Including this radio in the 'count', this is the second one I've seen....
A lot of the 1.5/3 volt tubes were made with clear tops. That was how they came from the maker. As you have found, they work fine.
You could re-stuff that battery, 10 ea 9v batteries and 6 of the largest 1.5 volt cells that will fit into the case.
I spy a three gang tuning cap (tuned RF stage). She should be a good DX rig.
Great to see you back. I have the Bakelite version of that radio,it's got more cracks than Humpty Dumpty Sorry if the spelling is off. I Liked,Shared,Added to playlists. All my best.
Another good one! Finally able, I'll be sending you one.
Not sure how you were able to contact him given that there is no email or anything similar anywhere on his channel.
@@tinecrinec4769 Via dustytubes@gmail
One thing I always wonder when you and others replace one of those stinking rectifiers with silicon. What would happen if you replaced it with not one diode, but with 4 built into a bridge rectifier. Would that not drop more voltage and yield a much quieter DC power supply for the set? Or would this have some detrimental effect on the set?
Zenith used Tolex for coverings on a lot of their portables.
I have one like that but I have no idea how to open the back can you make a video showing how
Ow may gad its old rado
Thanks for ths video
Abdul Araq bagdhad
Do you have Loktal tubes for sale. I need some for my Philco 40-88 DC radio.
Fun little radio I have brown version.
There must be a way of putting a modern battery in it.
Did you ever got a high pitch squeal when you turn the volume down? Got one radio doing that crazy stuff.
Yeah leaky cap.
@@45AMT You would most likely be spot on if an idiot (that being me) had not wired the automatic gain control circuit backwards after replacing an output transformer. Got the leads flipped and the squeal went away. Thank you for your input :)
Did you used to be Abandond SC?
I thought your channel has been permanently abandoned... Hopefully you stick to uploading.
That is a nice battery
Yes its very very hard to find for Museum pieces
You can re-stuff the battery.
You take the back off, and the Angels sing.
Очень люблю старую технику
Have one I will like tosell
60Hz from somewhere.
Battery for your Zenith th-cam.com/video/gWA1PMyNHyQ/w-d-xo.html and part 2th-cam.com/video/CtyX3qOug6o/w-d-xo.html
Amei..
Meu sonho é poder comprar um desse, e viver o passado... Tempo boom..
Mo mouse feces!!!!!
YOU SHOULD DO A RADIOTVPHONENUT AND PUT IT ON EBAY , THEN ASK FOR A RIDICULOUS AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR JUNK
Define "JUNK". I don't think you know what real JUNK is...
@@tinecrinec4769 You must be a hoarder to.
@@johnneybot9542 Actually I'm not. I was just wondering why you bother to take time out of your day to leave such an uneducated comment with poor grammar.
@@tinecrinec4769 Your mom is calling you time for bed, school in the morning
@@johnneybot9542 Apparently, you are too unprofessional to actually reply to my comment without making bland insults...