[49Stude63]

http://good-times.webshots.com/album/560959162xIePLV This is my 16X that I picked up for about $50 near Charlotte NC. The cabinet cleaned up well and I need to get a new dial for it, I have recapped it already. I have mostly 8-15 tube sets with a 38-690 that I picked up at a decent price that needs electrical restoration. Brain is "King of the 650's", very nice 8 tubers that you can pick up in console form very reasonable, the 650 tombstones like most of Philco's nicer tombstones will tend to get a bit pricey depending on circumstance. And yes unless you believe in "patience is a virtue" I would steer clear of the 40-41 models since they tend either have a little rubber wire to being completely riddled with rubber wire, it is a luck of the draw on the level of rubber wiring with no rhyme or reason to it. I have run into the early 40's radios with only a wire or two where the insulation was/had crumbled away with the other wires still being pliable and then other radios where it was a maze of bare or soon to be bare wires as soon as you touched or moved them (insulation would just crumble off). Some people will just remove one end and then run shrink tubing down the length of wire and re-solder the end back, doing this step for each wire, or some people just replace the wires, either way it's not a lot of fun. Contrary to Brain I tend to collect mostly the "dreaded" sub-chassis models 37-38 from the 9 tubers up, I have two 37 models 37-11,37-116, 37-675X, 38-1,2,3,116,690, and the 38-4 which is an odd-ball dial model that was available in in console, chairside, and table and another console version each being lesser tube count than the 38-4, all of them available for only one year. If you can get past the odd ball tuning arrangement of the 38-4 they are also nice radios that are simple to restore the chassis (non-subchassis).