Here is a well-made radio which has been sitting un-restored in my collection for many years.
It’s overall condition was not bad, although the grill cloth was badly torn. Otherwise it was fairly clean. The 29 hour project was completed January 2019. It took that long partly due to the fact I decided to deep clean the chassis and polish it up to a shiny chrome.
The tuner assembly had to be removed completely in order to clean it properly and to replace the badly deteriorated rubber mounts. This also entailed removal of the complete band-switch assembly, further adding to the length of the project.
Another small snag was that one of the lugs on the 6F6 tube socket was broken off, necessitating complete replacement of the tube socket.
As is common, I had to clean up poor wiring practices of previous repairmen. All too often, repairs in those days were made as quickly as possible without good attention to workmanship. The motto in many of those repair shops was: “time is money”!
Once all capacitors were changed and bad resistors replaced, the alignment was done and reception tuned out to be excellent. Only two out of the 7 tubes present needed to be replaced. The others were still strong.
A very closely matching new grill cloth was ordered, and carefully installed on to the speaker mounting board.
A piece of trim near the cabinet bottom was completely missing. It was a simple rectangular strip of wood, so a new one was made out of a wooden paint stirring stick, cut to size, then stained to match the cabinet, and clear coated. Afterwards it was glued in place.
The cabinet had a number of scuffs and scratches but nothing too serious to warrant a full stripping and refinishing. The scratches were cleaned up with a polishing stain formula to fairly hide most of them, leaving the cabinet in a very presentable condition.