06-01-2012, 02:57 AM
Quote:Hi Arran, thanks for your review, but what you call butchery, it is called here guinea Kiwi engineering. I believe between the nineteen forties and the Internet area, it was just impossible to get rare spare parts for oversees products. (except from commonwealth countries) I can image n that if you are owner of a radio like this, you want to keep it running as long as possible.
If I find the time, I will make a photo from the underneath.
The reason I called it butchery wasn't because of the fact that some parts were substituted but because of the way they installed those substitute parts, it was rather crudely done. If I were in their place I would have installed the filter choke on the frame of the replacement speaker along with the output transformer. It looks to me, judging by the design of the speaker and the age of the filter capacitors, that the work was performed in the 1950s or later, TCC caps were a British export that were often used in Canada both as replacements and as original parts in some sets.
Speaking of which most of the same parts that were missing in your set were readily available in Canada (and likely in Britain) from Philco parts jobbers at least into the early 1950s, so embargos wouldn't have been an issue if someone was determined to get the parts around that time, but the work looks newer then that. Likely the original power supply failed taking the speaker field with it and someone, likely a home tinkerer, decided to get it going with whatever was readily available including a Phillips/Mullard spray shielded tube.
Regards
Arran
Regards
Arran