[TA Forbes]

I aquired a "basket case" 116 tombstone awhile back. After successfully removing the white house paint it was covered with, I discovered a cabinet worth restoring. Unfortunately the chassis was not worth the same except as parts. HOWEVER.....

I had a 116X chassis and speaker in excellent condition. Putting it in the tombstone was not difficult. The only "modifications" I had to accomplish were: (1) taking a round file and carefully filing a "notch" on the inside of the cabinet so that the balance potentiometer located on the side of the chassis would clear the cabinet; (2) gluing wood supports on each (in)side of the cabinet to support the crossmember that supports the heavy aft end of the 116X speaker. Note: you MUST adjust the potentiometer to balance the 2 6A3 tubes prior to inserting the chassis into the cabinet.
RESULT: an excellent playing and sounding 116 tombstone radio.

AFTER ACTION: I DO NOT recommend modifying nice original radios that should be left in as original condition as possible. BUT I am satisfied that in this case marrying a formerly basket case cabinet with a "homeless" chassis was the right thing to do.

Color me pleased....

Tom

[Ron Ramirez]

Hi Tom

No doubt you are pleased! I once had a 116X chassis, which I later shoehorned into an early 116B shouldered tombstone cabinet. Only instead of using the U-7 console speaker, I used the speaker used in the tombstone, an H-13. I'm surprised the 116B will hold up that heavy U-7 speaker, even with added supports!

On mine, I did not file a notch for the hum control rheostat; it fit okay without adding a notch, but the rheostat did rub against that side of the cabinet. It did not come out of adjustment, though.

A tombstone with 15 watts audio output...all I can say is WOW!

I don't have my "hybrid" anymore, but instead I have two conventional 116B sets - both the early and late versions.

[Doug Houston]

While reading your tale about the 16 chassis in a T'stone case, everything seemed reasonable, until you got to the part with the type "U" speaker. Fer Pete's sake, were you really serious about putting a "U" speaker in anything besides a console cabinet? I'll need to go downstairs and look at a couple of my 16 sets. Had you never said all this, I'd just laughed at the idea of putting a big horse like that in such a little barn! Whoosh!

Now, laugh at my amazement, but I hve two versions of an Emerson set of 1941. It's actually a console chassis, the console being a side-by-side phono combination. Then, they also made the set as two table models, the cabinets being the only difference. This is where it gets nutty: The power amps in that chassis are 2-6L6 (Push-Pull), driving an 8 inch speaker barking out of the top. I re-capped one of the two sets I have, and the tube manual shows the 'L6's, as putting out 18 watts, with those voltages applied. I had a larger test speaker on the set when Iwas working on it, and that baby really does belch out the sound. Normally Emerson was very much, a middle-of-the-road set, but this one was the snazziest Emerson I know of. It has a broadbanded I.F. channel, and it does indeed, sound like a million bucks. That Emerson was their DS chassis, if you'd like to look it up.

Now, back to the Philco 16. We know that the "B" sets had watered-down audio in them, to save the speakers, but the consoles must have been capable of 20 watts, with the 42's operating in the connections that they were. That 16X chassis in that "B" cabinet must have been able to blow that case to toothpicks.

BTW Ron, the pkg. came Yesterday. I'm still working on getting your goodies together. The weather is wonderful these days, and I'm road testing and de-bugging one of my '41 Cadillacs, as long as the weather holds. Everything suffers for things like that.

[Ron Ramirez]

Hi Doug

Glad to know the package arrived OK.

No rush on what you're sending down here. You're lucky if you're having good weather lately. Cold, rainy and miserable is how the weather has been here the last few days. I think it will be better this weekend, though. I don't blame you for doing as much as you can outside before it gets too cold to do so. A '41 Cadillac is certainly a worthwhile project indeed. Good luck with yours!

I found a photo of an Emerson DS-365 at the Alternative Radio Forum.
http://antiqueradios.com/gallery/v/Emers...5.jpg.html

Very interesting. Indicators on the dial not only for the slide rule tuning, but also for the volume and tone controls. And 6L6 outputs for an AM-only radio.

Philco only used 6L6 tubes in a few of their prewar models. The 38-116, 38-690, 42-1016 and (I think) the 42-1015. I can think of two postwar models that used 6L6 tubes; the 48-1274 and 48-1276. All consoles, and all but the first two are radio-phonographs. I recall exchanging a few emails with someone a while back, who was going to modify a 116X chassis to use 6L6 outputs. I don't think he ever told me how it turned out, though.

[FStephenMasek]

Very interesting. Indicators on the dial not only for the slide rule tuning, but also for the volume and tone controls.[/quote] I have a Packard-Bell with similar vertical indicators beside the dial, one for treble, the other for bass.

[TA Forbes]

The two speakers are the same diameter, but you are correct in that the aft end is significantly heavier. Installing it without some kind of support would have been out of the question. Considering the investment that I had in the cabinet, well, the amount of money that I spent on it's initial purchase, anyway, I felt that it was worth the try. And besides, the idea intrigued me.......

Fifteen watts of power is indeed a fair amount for even a large tombstone like the 116B. But even though it is a "player" as are most of my radios, I never explore the max potential of them. Well, not how loud they will get, anyway.

HOWEVER, I still (thank God) get a kick out of tuning in stations from far away places at night when the "powerhouses" turn up the output. During the summer I was routinely getting Yankees baseball games on WCBS in NYC. That might not necessarily impress someone unless they also knew that I lived in North Carolina, or maybe it still might not if they were a Red Sox fan.

You might be interested in knowing that I did a similar marriage of kind of similar radios awhile back, in that I had a 16B cathedral cabinet and mistakenly purchased a 1935 year 16B chassis/speaker. Since I had had zero luck finding a chassis for the cabinet, I decided to marry the 1935 chassis to the earlier cathedral. The only mods to the cabinet were sleightly enlarging the hole where the tuning knob(s) went and new chassis bolt holes in the base of the cabinet. The result is what I feel a superior looking radio with the 1935-style knobs on all 4 controls and coarse/fine tuning. In fact, I like it so much that I have given up looking for a "correct" 16B cathedral.

My next project is a Philco 43B cathedral, with about 1/2" ground off the peak of the cabinet face. This ought to be good........