It’s been a bit since my last Philco find. Been messing around with some solid-state stuff and need to get back to a good old hollow state chassis. Picked this up today for my birthday present from my awesome and somehow very understanding and beautiful wife. Need to find the matching speaker now.
Matching Speaker search is over. Needs some work but for the price it was a great deal.
I spent many hours with one of those, the 514 green. It had spent 30+ years in the attic of a garage. Worst clean up job I've ever had. That paint is tough, I took off a lot of nicotine. Best part was the ps capacitor block was filled with wax, not tar, easy peasy. Worst part was the summer heat from the garage venue had melted some of the wax and it oozed out onto the chassis. Replacing the metal dial cord was a hair puller.
There was a 511, (or an updated 1929 model 65 version) Spanish Brown, model in my region, and even though it had obviously been repainted the seller insisted that it was original, the lack of shading was what tipped me off that it was not original. I have thought it might be interesting to customize a brown one with bad paint job, or rust. Getting a matching speaker for something like a 512 might be a problem, Apparently Philco sold the matching speakers separately, in case a potential buyer wanted to keep using a speaker they already owned, and since they cost an extra $27, that probably happened a lot. From what I remember, according to Ron's book, the ornamentation on sets like the 512 were hand painted, so you could have the flowers painted on different cabinets by different people, and the same goes with the speakers.
Regards
Arran
(This post was last modified: 03-09-2025, 06:33 PM by Arran.)
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