The PHILCO Phorum

Hello all! I joined up as this seems to be a great resource for Philco radios.

I found my Philco at an antique consignment shop my friends and I were browsing Saturday. Did not know the first thing about it, except I did like the style, and at $20 my friend talked me into it. Figured I couldn't lose. What you see is what I got, a cabinet that has seen better days, and no guts. My plan is to restore the outside to original spec, should be a challenge as I've never done woodworking before. There are also several gouges in the woodwork that need to be repaired and the veneer is lifting on the edges. So I'll be cruising this site to gather tips and tricks to repair the damage. As far as the guts, this may be sacrilege, but since the tuner and whatnot is long gone, I plan on building an Audrino to stream music from a server on my home network. This will include a graphical LCD display installed behind the radio dial and programmed to display song info, etc, fit to the curved dial. My friend owns a 3d printer business and has all the electronics and know-how on that front, and will be teaching me to setup one. It can also be programmed to display weather and time when sitting idle. Should be pretty slick. I then found on the net DIY vacuum tube amplifiers for 200, pricey but should give an appropriate sound to match the looks of the set. I plan to  install switches with the original knobs to control all the functions of the system, but since it's network connected I can control it with a phone or computer. I plan on doing all this with as little mods to the cabinet as possible, should be easily doable.

Here's my new project:



Thanks for reading and I look forward to this project!

Welcome to the Phorum!
When you start your cabinet work you can post your questions in the Cabinet Restoration section.

I've been looking thru there for tips already! Been looking for materials and ideas so far, found the correct cloth and the On-off/volume knobs on ebay. Searching for the correct tuning and band switch knobs currently. Restoration will begin once I'm done with getting the house ready for winter. Have a ways to go on that yet!

 Since it's an empty cabinet anyhow there is really no harm in doing as you suggest, now if the original chassis and speaker were still with it, or if it were a cabinet for a rare model I would probably say otherwise. However I would not totally abandon the idea of finding an original chassis and speaker for your 37-640's cabinet, so what I would suggest is making any modifications reversible such as by using the original  holes for the controls and chassis bolts, it will look better as a finished product anyhow. With the speaker it doesn't really matter since the baffle board is easily removed and replaced by another to accommodate whatever size and however many speakers you can fit behind that grille.
Regards
Arran

My plan is to keep it as original as possible on the outside, with the modern guts. My friend has two laser cutters that he uses to make the parts for the 3D printers he sells, he said I can make anything I want with them. So I will make a board to mount the amp and Andruino, the board with bolt down to the original chassis mounting locations. I will have to come up with a creative solution to secure the screen and switches however, I may have an idea that would be easily reversible.

Took some before pics to document the original condition. My phone isn't the greatest at this.



Worst of the damage. Seems someone dropped something heavy on it at one point, cracking off a chunk of veneer and cracking the support. I was thinking of filling the crack with wood glue and clamping it to fix that, but I might be in trouble with the veneer.....





Dial is pretty good.



The inside coating, what is it called?



The model sticker and the schematics sticker inside, are both in good shape