[kiwi_steve]

I feel like everyone is being a little harsh on what seems like quite a clever guy when you read about him. Tragically killed during the war too so he probably never got to repair a single one. Sure, his legacy to restorers some 80 years later is a chassis that generally requires stripping to get all the caps replaced - but I'd imagine he was under commercial and personal (proving himself in a big new company) pressures to come up with innovations (probably more for marketing than true engineering reasons) and streamline the manufacturing process. Who hasn't in the past done something that seemed like a good idea at the time, eh?

And yes, I own 3 of them... 37-61, 37-630 and a 37-640.

So many radios take 10 minutes to get going again... at least Philco thought ahead and must have realised that every now and then we'd need a bit of a challenge to keep us feeling alive

As to the original question - there was one in the 89B I did... at the time it seemed like a good idea to replace the resistor envelope with a modern equivalent... but in hindsight there was absolutely no reason to have done so - it was (as most wirewound resistors are) still bang on the money. It was a combo decoupling cap and cathode bias resistor for one of the tubes from memory... so my guess is that it was put in there for simplicity in manufacturing... one less component to hand wire in to the chassis. One wire to the cathode, bolt to the chassis for ground. Done. And the middle tags are free for something else if needed. I love bakelite blocks for all the reasons everyone else above does. Neat, tidy, nice to restuff and they make the wiring neater... sometimes.

Cheers

Steve