[Nick3092]

Last weekend I came across a 37-116 Deluxe in beautiful condition, with the original finish. It was a little more than I wanted to spend on a single radio, but the seller did come down to what is probably my upper limit on a radio. Given the condition of the finish and this radio's performance, I couldn't pass it up.

   

The seller said that he used it from time to time, and powered it on for me. I noticed the pilot and flood lights were not functioning. But the radio played quite nicely with a slight hum, but not bad.

So I got it home, and pulled the chassis. All the light sockets were suffering from the usual Philco spring/rubber melting issue. So I went through and fixed them all with a nylon washer and heat shrink like I've done on all my other Philcos. One of the springs broke, so i got a similar sized one from Ace Hardware. Its a bit stiffer, but seems to work. I also see that the two 8uF filter caps were replaced at some point. All the other electrolytic cans appear to be original.

The dial is in good shape, but doesn't always move with the vernier dial and tuning cap, so I need to disassemble that mechanism and see what is going on there. All the station tabs are missing or broken. The tabs all look to be made of the same phenolic material the dials are, vs the cardstock/paper tabs used in the later '39/'40/'41 models. Can't say that I've seen anyone (meaning Mark O. or Radio Daze) reproducing these tabs. Is that the case? Has anyone tried substituting the cardstock tabs on this dial? If so, does it work OK?

I ran all the tubes through my Hickok 533A, and all but 3 tested strong. I tested the 3 that did were coming up as bad/questionable on my Weston 981-1, and they were above the reject point. Given the radio works and at least one tester shows them as good, I'll probably leave them as is.

Under the chassis, it appears only 2 wax/papers were replaced. I didn't look at the schematic to determine which two, but I will replace them all. And I noticed one side of the 4k/1k candohm opened up, as someone put in a ceramic tube resistor to replace half of it. And surprisingly, didn't use the open terminal on the candohm, like every other candohm repair I ran across.

I'm currently in the planning phases, and looking for some input. As with any Philco, I've already ordered the info pack from Chuck S. I've compiled a list of the caps and resistors using the copy from NA and will be ordering them in the near future. I'm not going to start any work until I have all the parts, so I'm not sitting around for a week or two at a time waiting for something.

For the filter caps, I'm assuming they were originally 8uF and most likely rated 475v. The current cans are 8uF and 600v. I see that in the run changes on NA, they dropped the filter caps from 8uF to 4uF in run 5. If I understand correctly, usually a lower capacity lowers the amount of filtering. But it also drops the rectifier voltage a little bit (I'm basing that assumption off the fact if you up the capacity, it causes the voltage to go up). I usually order exact values whenever possible from Dave at JR. He does have 8 and 4uF's @ 450v. But with 5v rectifiers, I've heard it's better to go with 500v caps instead. I haven't checked DK/Mouser, but the smallest 500v Dave has is 10uF. Given I'm assuming Philco saw a benefit to decreasing the filters from 8 to 4, should I do the same? And for the voltage, am I better off trying to track down a 500v regardless of what uF value I go with?

The other burning question right now is the candohms. I'm not a fan of them, and usually replace them even if they do appear to be functional. The problem here is they are mounted close to each other, and in a somewhat inconvenient place. And I don't know what wattage to replace them with. It looks like one of the candohms (part 118) is actually just a single section 14k .5 watt resistor. If it's only .5 watt, I'm sort of surprised they used a candohm, as you would think it's not putting out that much heat. As usual for candohms, there is no rating on the 4k/1k (part 124). Any suggestions on wattage ratings here for replacement resistors?

As for working on the chassis, there seem to be 2 schools of thoughts. Remove the wires connecting the RF section, and remove it completely. The other is to some how fold it all up like a rubiks cube and not detach the wires. Any pros/cons to either approach? I would like to replace the 3 rubber bushings on the RF sub chassis anyway, not sure if that makes either method more desirable.

And speaking of the rubber pieces, I'm looking at Renovated Radios to see what I need. On two of the shafts on the front, there are 1 each of the spacer grommets (GPH-spacer) and 2 each of the smaller spacers (GPH-spacer2). Is that correct? And securing the chassis was only a single screw with a metal sleeve. Is any kind of grommet supposed to be around that sleeve? On 2 of the corners, I have some badly deteriorated chassis washers. I can't measure them as they are flattened and distorted. Would CW8 be the appropriate washers for the 4 corners? And for the 3 grommets on the RF sub chassis, would i go with GPH-RF or GPH-690-RF?

I've restored around 11-12 radios in the past, a few Philcos, a few RCA's, and a couple other brands. The biggest ones I've done were a 40-180 and an RCA T10-1. The 40-180 is not as "big" of a radio, but the chassis was roomy and I had to replace all the rubber wiring. The RCA was bigger component wise, but still roomy. But this one dwarfs hem both in size and complexity. Given how nice this radio is, I want to take extra time and make sure I do it right. So I welcome any input or suggestions on how to handle this radio. I've never done a thread with continual updates while restoring either, so I think I will give that a try with this thread.

Thanks in advance for any feedback/tips/answers. I know I just dumped a lot into this first post, but once I started thinking about everything, my brain wouldn't stop.

-Nick