The Westinghouse 578 is a classic “All American Five” table radio for the budget-minded. This one was made in Hamilton, Ontario Canada, 1946-47, with a very cool “space age” mid-century modern design.
This 7 1/2 hour project was completed April, 2025.

This radio, as found, had been repainted, but the interior was very dirty, and obviously had been in a heavy smoking home, as everything was coated with a brownish “soot”. The chassis in this model is mounted ‘underside-up’, so that the components under the chassis were extremely dirty. The glass dial was taped in place with duct tape, and the dial cord was in poor condition.

The cleanup job took quite some time, and the replacement of capacitors and resistors was a small challenge as many previous repairs had been done with very poor workmanship. It was almost a total rebuild job. A new dial cord and tension spring was installed, and the dial had to be securely installed with “Goop” adhesive, as all of the original snap-ring tabs had broken off.

When testing the completed radio, I found that the volume goes to almost full when the control was set to minimum. I noted that the wiring to the high arm of the control did not conform to the schematic. There was no evidence of this being a replacement control or any alteration. I concluded that this was a factory defect in the wiring, and was never corrected. This is actually not a very rare occurrence. Once I re-wired according to the schematic, the volume control operation was normal.

One common problem with radios of this type was that the back of the radio, containing the loop antenna, would commonly be warped. This can be seen in the “before” photo of the underside view of the chassis. To fix this, the back has to be removed, and all components, rivets, loop, etc. must be removed. I would then lightly spray with water, and put the back into a press overnight. This effectively flattens it out again once the moisture has evaporated.