[mikethedruid]

I called Nick Dorazio this morning and explained to him about my speaker problem. He told me he could rebuild it no problem, so I sent it off to him. In the meantime I have a 1 meg pot with a switch coming to replace the one in the radio which has some bad spots. I am not such an obsessive purist as to look for a perfect match for the original. I'm not doing a museum restoration. This is a brand new pot. The radio will look absolutely the same from the outside. It is like my philosophy when doing any radio repairs on these old sets. I don't try to hide the work I have done. I don't strip and re-stuff the old paper condensers, I just replace them with new ones. I figure this will make things a lot easier for anybody who has to service the set in future years. They will easily know what has been done, and what has not. Everything looks the same from the outside anyway. The only way you see the new parts is if you pull the chassis, and only a person who is going to do electronic repair work is going to do that. I figure, why make it more difficult for them. I know I wouldn't appreciate the cosmetic falsehoods were I going to work on a radio. It would mean I would end up replacing a lot of parts that I didn't need to, thinking they were old parts. Maybe it is a result of my doing these kind of repairs for over fifty years. It's how I feel, and how I do things anyway. So now I have to wait a few weeks to get the speaker back. In the meantime I have that potentiometer to replace, and I think I will make a brand new speaker board for the radio. I have enough grill cloth to cover it several times over, so I may as well do it so I can use screws the way it was originally done, and not risk messing up again. When the speaker comes back, if I'm happy with the result, I'll post the link to Nick's shop in Atlanta, so it can be added to the list of repair resources.