Last December I received this Philco 444 People's Set from 1936 from across the pond after shoveling out quite a bit of quid which translates into many worthless Canuckastan Beaver Pelts .
The good:
In many ways it is in excellent condition including the impossible to find back cabinet cover that many don't have and replacements are usually impossible to find. Reproductions have been made but involve hours of drilling the tiny vent holes.
The chassis has minimal rust whereas many are usually brown or worse from high humidity and poor storage.
The speaker is in excellent condition, all wiring being cotton is very flexible, undamaged, and all in very reusable condition with only slight fading of the speaker wiring.
Also under the chassis, it appears to be completely untouched, molested, or as they say on the British forums "it's been got at"
The cabinet other than filthy with mostly tobacco tar from decades of smoking has zero cracks, scuffs, or other damage but a bit dull after cleaning.
All around appears very complete a major bonus.
The Bad:
After removing the chassis, speaker, speaker/grill cloth mount a complete or somewhere close to this cleaning was performed to the empty cabinet and speaker cloth.
After much pondering, procrastination, and concern about possible finish damage I decided to use Spray Nine cleaner being concerned about what possible damage to the gloss this could result in.
I placed the cabinet in the bathtub, sprayed it down with Spray Nine and dark brown liquid looking like dark chocolate oozed out and continued after numerous rinses and reapplying.
The speaker grill cloth is supposed to be a light cream color, was yellow/brown barf (looking like it was under a chicken coupe) and now is a yellow amber color after much cleaning to attempt to use as a sample.
A label inside indicating various jargon about regulations etc. was dark brown instead of white and fell apart but I was able to get a scan from over the pond for reprinting.
The Ugly:
The Speaker grill cloth is (what's left of it) Silk which numerous collectors and those knowledgeable about these radios say it is, is next to impossible to find due to not being reproduced including Tygon as well. Sources have totally dried up and disappeared making exact replacement harder to locate than wooden rocking horse droppings!. Out of desperation I went to our local sewing shop, asked for satin material and came up with a light cream colored thin, glossy like the original, somewhat conservative, not to gaudy or "loud" (I hope?) that looks a bit fancier, hopefully looks politically and period correct? Correct me if I'm wrong and steer me to something more tasteful if necessary and possible?
After a number of hours of polishing using Automotive Clear Coat Finishing polish it recovered from the cleaning process looking very close to what it originally looked like when new in 1936 (I hope) and descriptions, pictures etc. indicate it is close. It has a bit of an unusual appearance but is mostly the appearance of Bakelite being pressed into a mold during manufacturer.
I had it partially disassembled doing an assessment of what I should order for capacitors from Sal and decided to take a pause for the cause so I reassembled it without the speaker cloth so nothing would get lost/misplaced, damaged, or worse forgetting how it went together in the first place
On the UK forums many chirp about that PENDD61 "valve" being miserable close to impossible to find but I located a good spare for 30 quid and it arrived before the radio. An NOS British Mazda AC2/PEN/DD Valve was located in Germany of all places for 7 Euro so I snapped that one up as well as it is a direct substitute replacement with the exception of a resistor being needed to drop the heater voltage from 6.3 down to 4 volts. If they want difficult to locate perhaps they should purchase a 3NFW, 3NFWL used Loewe Opta EB100W, Opta Gotland WL of which someday I hope to glom onto because having a tube containing 3 individual "valves", resistors, and capacitors, all enclosed in their own individual envelopes all contained on one bottle I find quite interesting and is probably as close as I will ever get to a Loewe EO333.
I'm attempting to add pictures but this is becoming impossible going through all the steps, selecting, adding with nothing showing up in the preview or post.
Here is another attempt before I call it quits.
Picture is selected, add attachment is selected and no picture. Shouldn't be this difficult to post a picture
OK...I tried a few pictures of mine using the Attachment process (I usually post from dropbox).
If the picture is too large (mine was something around 1.5 mb) it will not work well or at least did not for me. A smaller picture worked OK. Sorry you are having trouble with this.
I switched browser to Microshaft IE instead of Chrome so I will retry. No smoke has started yet so here goes or should I get a blanket and send smoke signals?
How does one re edit a picture for a smaller size? I attempted to add multiple pictures last night and ended up with the same image twice. Today that image wont work and this was in a saved draft that I used for the first post above. This lousy photo is only 340KB and the rest of what I got are 1.198 megs up to 2.7megs. Nowadays file sizes are not very small with cameras and phone cameras
(This post was last modified: 11-12-2018, 09:04 PM by Philco444.)
The Pen/DD61 was basically a peace offering made to the British Valve Association, by Philco of Great Britain, to incorporate a tube designed by one of the BVA member companies into a British Philco as opposed to using an American tube like all their other models used. If I'm not mistaken the Pen/DD61 is a Marconi Osram design, whom mainly manufacture tubes with 4 volt AC filaments, but for this set they took one of their existing tubes and reworked it with a 6.3 volt heater to match up with the rest of the tubes Philco used in these sets.
The English like to gripe about these tubes, but that's because they can't wrap their head around the North American RMA system of tubes we use here, substitution is actually very straightforward. What can be done is to dump the Pen/DD altogether, and substitute it with either a #42 or a 6F6G, by either building an adapter using a base from a dead tube, or by drilling out the British style socket and replacing it with an octal or six pin one. Now what about the two diodes in the Pen/DD? Here you can either use a pair of SS detector diodes, such as a 1N34 or equivalent, or you can substitute the 78E tube for a 6B7, which is a second detector/IF amplifier. I tend to think of it in the same way as a set that uses WD11s, yes you could probably find good WD11s, but then you wouldn't dare use them as they are fragile and expensive.
I ran into a 444 about 15 years ago at a radio club meeting, it was up for sale in a silent auction, it had some issues with the cabinet, some deep scratches or chips or something, I put a bid in but the seller didn't get what he wanted and ended up taking it home with him. I have seen others turn up on these shores from time to time, either brought over by radio collectors or people who immigrated from over there.
Knowing what I know now I would probably settle on one with either a bad or missing Pen/DD61 tube to keep the price down, which it tends to since the number of 444s exceeds the number of these tubes available, not unlike an Aeriola Senior, or Radiola III/IIIA. Perfect originality in such a set is not really that important to me since it's not really the greatest performer in the world, it was a mass produced budget set, and probably one of the most common pre war British radios, so how much do you want to put into one to make it play? If they wanted to cut down on the tube count they they should have done what Arvin did and left out the IF amp, or copied the models 80, 81, 84 etc from their American siblings. In my opinion the set to look for in this series of models is called a model A-537, it has five tubes, including a #75 first audio/detector/avc, and all are American types, the extra tube makes a lot of difference in performance, even in old blighty.
Regards
Arran
Here is an older thread on British Philcos, I repeated much of what I posted there.
Quote:I placed the cabinet in the bathtub, sprayed it down with Spray Nine and dark brown liquid looking like dark chocolate oozed out and continued after numerous rinses and reapplying.
Quote:After a number of hours of polishing using Automotive Clear Coat Finishing polish it recovered from the cleaning process looking very close to what it originally looked like when new in 1936 (I hope)
Factoid: Bakelite is not an indestructible plastic. It can be dissolved using caustic chemistry, particularly strong household cleaners.
Although this is not 100% true for some Bakelite formulations, exposure to sun and household contaminates alters the surfaces. Therefore, the same radio may hold up to a strong cleaner but from another environment will be dissolved. What was actually happening is the top, gloss layer, of Bakelite was removed. The smell of phenol is most obvious and is often confused with nicotine tar..
Some Bakelite have a course filler to keep it stable from shrinking. The outer layer is caused by the filler migration away from the mold. It is not very thick, wash it off and the filler is exposed. This is very difficult if not impossible to polish.
Consider using a far gentler cleaner such as Murphy's Oil soap or the Go-Jo method. Either way the surface will be clean without dissolving the Bakelite.
YMMV
Chas
Pliny the younger
“nihil novum nihil varium nihil quod non semel spectasse sufficiat”
And meanwhile Spray Nine is not overly powerful and is gentle compared to Fantastic etc. I ended up with excellent results as an end result and of course sun has its effect on Bakelite as well. This is why I used extreme caution at first and much cigar cigarette tar came off. The cloth is very brown and should be pale cream color again indicating how bad the tar was. This polishing compound is ultra fine for finishing clear coat to a glass like appearnance and if some revitalization is required the wax (Turtle Wax) certainly did the trick. Since I'm not able to post picture it would appear, I would have posted before and after pictures!! As for Microsoft Paint and Photo editors this means ALWAYS uploading pictures to a desktop or laptop PC (since my Crapple diePhone won't work and being proprietary pay pay pay I will be ditching it soon). I'm sure I'm not the only one with this opinion for what is required to post pictures. Ah yes opinions are like "a holes, we all have one"
Don
PS since this is a so called British set which in reality is an American Philco PHILco Battery CO wearing a disguise impersonating a British name hahaha then perhaps this thread should be moved to the foreign sets??
(This post was last modified: 11-13-2018, 08:25 PM by Philco444.)
Philco was an acronym for Philadelphia Storage Battery Company, wanting to expand their market they established Philco companies in various countries around the world, first to import U.S made sets or chassis, and then later to produce sets more locally. The 444 was a creation of Philco of Great Britain LTD, in so they used a mix of imported and locally sourced parts, some sets of theirs had more of one then the other. Incidentally, I did find some service info for the 444, you can thank Phil Nelson for posting this on his site:
I don't think that Spray Nine is too harsh on Bakelite, Bob Andersen uses that quite regularly in his restoration work. I've used laundry detergent to clean Bakelite as well with good results. Chances are that it did have nicotine, or at least lots of grease, dirt, and wax on it if the grille cloth was yellowed that much, smoking was a popular hobby over there just like here, and they probably sat right next to the radio whilst they were doing so.
Regards
Arran
(This post was last modified: 11-16-2018, 04:17 AM by Arran.)
PenDD4020 Is a direct substitute EXCEPT it needs a resistor on the heater to drop it down to 4.3 volts or somthing like that. My toob number above was totally wrong. I purchased an NOS 4020 for 7 Euro so the British can chirp over their cup of tea. Just like they say how hard the "Fangers" and parts are to find, again nonsense! Just Deutsch sprechen, nicht britisch!! Oh and throw your right arm in the air and hollar Sieg Heil. What amazes me is back before Hitler rose to power and the cry of Sieg Heil became the thang I was watching an American documentary showing how this was done(right arm raised) when the American flag was being raised. Oh oh! Not politically correct just like my mother could only speak German thanks to my Great Grandmother teaching her to read and write but in the old text. My Grandparents figured if there was something they spoke that they didn't want her to hear and understand they spoke English. Another oh oh and strictly verboten when Canuckastan entered the war. Ah yes the good ol days.
dark brown liquid looking like dark chocolate oozed out and continued after numerous rinses and reapplying.
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