The PHILCO Phorum

First "Hello"

I just joined The Philco Forum because I own a 40 180 that I purchased a few years ago and I want to get it working better than it currently does.

I just spent a few hours sifting through the many posts on this popular set and many of my initial questions regarding the condition of my radio were answered by doing so.

Let me tell you a bit about my 40 180 ...

I bought it for $100 back in 2005 locally (Mid Hudson Valley NY) from a woman who had it sitting in her outside garage. It looked to be in good shape when I checked it out at night with a flashlight! So I brought her home.
The cabinet is in decent shape (Pics to be posted soon) except for some missing angled veneer pieces on the vertical risers on the facia that I'm hoping to repair soon. There are also two small water damage areas to the wood finish on the right side that are hardly noticable and may be less so once I finally get around to using a good antique wood finish product on it. I'm currently waiting for my new wine colored buttons to arive form RadioDaze that will really improve the way she looks when intalled. So she looks good and doesn't need a radical cabinet resto. Now let's talk operational nuts and bolts stuff.

After reading some of the posts here I guess I got lucky when I decided to bring her home and after a quick visual "once over" and vacuuming of he internal dust, I just plugged ger in and she powered up !! So I started messsing around with the controls until I figured out how to get the tuner to work and got her tuned in to a local "Oldies" station. To my surprise she played good and I really haven't done anything to her ... yet.

Like I said, I just ordred new push buttons so that's step one. My radio will play decently for a while but will have volume drops or will need to be re-tuned into the station in order to get her going strong again. This sounds like a capacitor issue based on the posts here and I am going to bring it to an experienced radio guy this week to get him to replace the caps. The speaker is in good shape so no problems there. I've yet to remove the chassis to look inside at the guts but the top side looks good with no bare wires or anything like that has been mentioned in other posts.
I always keep her unplugged her until I want to play it (just to be on the safe side).

I'll post some questions later on.

Going to sleep now.

Good Night!

Frankivity (it's my way of life)

You are indeed lucky that the set is playing well. You will need to change out all the electric and wax capacitors for a start, and then check out all the resistors in the set to see if they are still OK. Most if them will read high out of circuit, and you really need to change them if they're more than 15% out of whack. The tubes are innocent until proved guilty. Looks lilke you have a winner.

Wow! Lucky you--one that works right from "go!"

Bear in mind I haven't actually started restoring any radios yet, so my advice may be limited in value, but...

...since it's currently in a working state, may I suggest that this radio is an ideal candidate for the replace-one-component-and-test method of re-capping. That way, if it suddenly goes dark/quiet/unhappy on you, you know which chunk of the radio is causing the problem--the one you just replaced.

Thank You for the replies!

As I am not an electronic guru, I have located a local guy who is and I will be bringing my old bird into the shop this week. So thanks to this forum I can at least sound like I am aware of what is needed to be done (caps, resistors etc ...) My guesstimate for cost of repair s is @ 175.00 hopefully less but probably not.

I'll be posting PICs soon

`KiVitY