This is an educational AM transistor radio kit, originally constructed by my high-school friend, at Northview Heights Collegiate in our electronics class in 1970.  The Electro-Kits were produced in Canada in the late 1960’s-early 1970’s. I don’t believe my buddy was ever able to get it working properly, and at a later date, gave it to me as he became disinterested in the electronics field. I finally decided in the spring of 2020 to pull it off the shelf and see if I could get it working again.

This radio is a chassis version of a very typical 6-transistor Japanese-made radio of the day. In fact, all of the components used are Japanese-made, and could have been used in a typical printed-circuit version. A typical schematic of one of these was pulled from a site online and was used for tracing the wiring to be sure everything was wired properly. I did note that the detector diode cathode was not soldered in place. After this was connected, powered up and did get some noise and a very broadly tuned station.

To get this thing back to working condition, in summary I did thus:

• Peaked IF transformers-resulted in oscillations
• Slid the loose antenna coil on the core and found a ‘sweet spot’, then glued into place
• Replaced all electrolytic capacitors as they were no doubt bad after so many years of shelf life
• Did some minor re-wiring to the front end, including adding a  small capacitor between the oscillator coil tap and the converter emitter.

These procedures restored good superheterodyne operation, and I was able to properly peak the antenna and oscillator trimmers.