[Oldie Goldie]

I'm sure your familiar with the phony Philco flavored fake cathedral radios from China.
They have what amounts to a cheap pocket transistor radio board inside a particle board cathedral style cabinet with some cheap oak veneer. It comes with a horrible generic tape deck that breaks just looking at it and a speaker that would sound kinda ok if it had an amplifier with the power to drive it. Which it doesn't.
I saw it at a thrift store for $10 and wanted to see/hear if it was as bad as they say.
Ehh...it functions as well as a cheap POS transistor radio is expected to.
The big particle wooden cabinet helps it out though.
It has a design flaw that it's other style radios have. The speaker is mounted to a back board with the grill cloth over it behind the decorative cut out on the front. The backboard has a channel of fiberboard down the center of the hole, almost covering the speaker. The opening is like two capital Ds back to back. Cut the center "column" out and it sounds a lot better.
The sensitivity sucks. The sound was mediocre. The knobs were....cheap.
I spent $2.00 and got a commercial grade automotive (bus?) radio at another thrift store.
Spent Saturday gutting it, cutting a rectangular hole in the front, filing the edges, mounting the radio, and testing it. I pulled out the excess globs of hot snot glue. Why I spray bombed the inside battleship grey today I don't know. It did cover up a lot of the super cheap china construction.
It sounds really good, even with that dinky speaker. And its sensitive as a car radio with an rf amp front end should be!
Well I have a big beefy 5ohm speaker I want to put in tomorrow. Have to make a new backboard. Need to figure out an internal power supply.
Going to put a blank panel over the tape deck hole. Maybe put an aux in Jack? The radio has aux in RCA cables.
It was a sweet surprise the display was amber/orange and not nuclear blue or fire red.
I had a lot of fun doing a little woodworking putting this together yesterday. What do you think? It's going to sit up on my fridge for kitchen ambient music and morning news/propaganda report.
Some might think this is an abomination but I was about to dump it in the garbage the way it was. Than got this idea.
I hope you like it.

[Paul Philco322]

If you enjoy it and had fun working on it then good for you. Enjoy it. Seems like you did a good renovation on that thing. It was never an antique to begin with so no abomination.

[Oldie Goldie]

I'm not putting my real Philco 610 up on my fridge.

[Oldie Goldie]

I understand this is not a Philco, nothing about it is Philco other than the cathedral styling some low-ball china company highjacked.
I just thought it would give people a kick seeing it.
I wanted a radio with car radio sensitivity, a CD player and used that china carcass as an excuse to fill my time yesterday.

[RodB]

So did you save some space for the 12 volt battery?

[morzh]

As long as man does not break the law and make other people uncomfortable, he is free to do whatever with whatever.
Why spend time and money, however small, on it? Well, it is your time and money, and as long as you enjoy it, or the process, great.
I know I have enough real projects, including two real Philco 70 (this is a fake 70), so $10 will by me some grommets...

[Oldie Goldie]

The little pocket radio speaker wasn't really sponge worthy.
Pulled it out and put in OEM Ford door panel oval speaker.
Did away with the pot metal "Philco" tuning window as the speaker filled up the cabinet.

Powering it with a power supply from the original PlayStation 3 Fatboy. Very unreliable console, CPU/GPU would cook itself, blueray drive was software tied to the mobo, etc. but the power supplies were solid. Copper heatsink and Nichicon caps.
I found three busted consoles in a ditch back in 2015. Kept the power supplies.
And the uranium glass bowls and goodies.

[Oldie Goldie]

It sounded a bit muffled. I realized the speaker had to yell it's way through the Ford plastic holey mesh grill, than the phoney balogni china "Philco" grill cloth.
Pulled it apart and melted the plastic grill a big fat hole. For grill plastic Ford used some tough stuff.
It sounds a lot clearer now!

The PS3 power supply has the grunt to run this thing. The 12v 5A smp bricks can't, the sound gets crusty.
My kilawatt meter said something bearly above 17w consumed with my big fat bench power supply.
I want to stuff a transformer, rectifier and filter in there but I'm afraid of it getting jacked up over 14v with a big filter.

Arrrgggg....I don't know what I'm doing me hardies

[Oldie Goldie]

Wow I messed up.
Had the speaker hooked up to just right front -/+ for mono sound.
Radio doesn't have a mono mode.
I understood all that.

Tried to feed it front right +
and front left (+).
Sounded crap.

Than I fed the speaker
front right (+) and
Left front (-)

There we go, very nice!

[Oldie Goldie]

Strange, I took a dinky 12v 2.5A wall wart and now it runs happy as a clam off it. I think the distortion was the original way I wired the speaker with front right -/+

Used a 5A brick as I could cut up a power cable and put it in.

Soldered everything, heatsink tubing on the power lines. Stuffed the power brick unceremoniously in the side. Might cut and bend a metal bracket or might not.
I left the wires long for future servicing like a real Philco.

[Oldie Goldie]

Filled in the cassette deck hole with a piece of wood. Went around the rim with a black marker so it matches the trim.

I bet the AM band might be corn holed because of the smp power brick running the thing, but where I am in Belleville it's an AM deadline.
So who cares.

[Oldie Goldie]

Thanks Paul Philco322

[Oldie Goldie]

It's making the best of things huh?

[Oldie Goldie]

This helped me, working on this heap....to practice cutting wood and soldering so I don't bust something actually made by pre-50s Philco.
This is something you can appreciate. I understand I'm being ridiculed and snickered at but I spent $12 and I got some practice cutting straight and building some self confidence.

And I won't have an effing heart attack if I put a '36 Philco on my fridge and it gets knocked onto the floor and shattered by my housecat or house guest.

[Oldie Goldie]

The Ford speaker came right out of a dumpster.