[Electrothaumaturgist]

Well, it's been five days since I mated the chassis to the cabinet. What a beast... I can only imagine what a 690 would be like to service, or, egads, something worse. I took my time over the course of a few months as time and circumstances permitted and found a beautiful, super solid, powerful player as the end result. It is nothing short of a miracle that I didn't have to purchase any tubes, transformers or anything else other than caps, electrolytics and resistors to make it play!!! (As a matter of fact, I don't know if my multimeter was acting up or what, but a few things tested *AHEM* bad, or half-bad: choke, output transformer, field coil, etc... Just didn't think about it much and didn't worry as I "knew" it would come alive regardless, as ALL my other sets have done in the past. I guess the spirits of technicians past must channel through me, and have even made mysterious repairs to the unit in the middle of the night on their own accord!   Truly, I have no other explanation  ).  At any rate, if any of you saw the condition of this speaker (I posted an image recently in someones' post), you would not believe the wonderful sound it puts out! The bass is completely adjustable in all of the tonal ranges, and THUMPS!!! The sound is full and rich, and I understand what Philco was going for with that 4 position tone switch set up (Though, as Arran put it I think- slightly clunky in operation), it just goes through the whole spectrum with dynamic sound!!! Nothing short of MARVELOUS!!! It played flawlessly for over 400 hours over the last couple of months before final reassembly. I fell asleep the other night for 9 hours with the radio on, and when I got up, it was at the volume I put it at to begin with. That scared me a little bit, but all seemed normal, save she was a tad bit warm... There are still a couple of things I need to do to it (maybe a bucking transformer to kick the voltage back to 115v, instead of the 123v she runs on now). The building I live in is the worst ever for reception on any radio, but I'm running a 20' reception wire looped back around and grounded to the chassis (it eliminates 99% of static on the lower end of the dial especially, much like a DX/LOCAL switch). It pulls in stations better than any modern radio in the house! I want to thank everyone who donned assistance to me with this project!!! THANK YOU!!!