75 Year Old Receiver Found In A Barn, Will It Still Work?

hi everyone and welcome to another episode of mr. Carlson's lab I found a really neat old receiver in a barn and so it's in really rough shape a 75 year old receiver and it's designed to receive the broadcast band and parts of the Marine Band now this receiver was designed to be on a boat so it runs on a low voltage system and it has a thing called a Dino motor to step the voltage up so that the vacuum tubes can operate so really what that is is a motor and a generator all in one and this is right on the chassis of the radio so what we're gonna do is we're just going to add the components it needs to make it work again so already it's just missing a couple of components we'll add those in and we'll see if this receiver from 1945 comes back to life again with almost nothing done to it there should be a lot of fun so let's get started here's the Spilsbury and Tyndale radio from 1945 straight out of the barn right on to the bench and as you can see it's definitely seen better days spiders on here still and everything cobwebs all over it so it looks like it's been exposed to the elements for quite a while so it should be really interesting to see if this thing comes back to life so this right here is a dynamo tur and what a dynamo tur is is it's a generator and an electric motor all in one so what happens is the electric motor side which is a 24 volt side spins up the generator side which is on the other side so there's two sets of commutator there's a commutator on this side and a commutator on this side so two commentators and two sets of brushes and what happens is is when the motor spinning it creates high voltage on the other side so there's two different lines in here these are very common in aircraft radios and all that kind of stuff lots of military gear way way back in the day so this really is the heart of the radio if this thing doesn't spin nothing's gonna happen then we'll have to disassemble this and see if we can get it spinning but hopefully it still spins and usually they're pretty noisy you see the little grommets on the bottom here are pretty bad zoom on into this a little bit grommets down here pretty bad so it's gonna buzz away now the radio itself runs on 32 volts and it says 24 volts here the reason it runs at 32 and this is rated at 24 is because there is some filtering between the input which will go in here somewhere this is the only connection to the radio so there is some filtering between the input and the you know the Dino motor so the reason that there has to be that drop is because there's going to be inductors and capacitors and sometimes resistors in line with this and there has to be that loss between the two so we get adequate filtering now this thing makes a lot of noise not only you know to your ears but to the radio itself because you know it's spinning DC motor if you've ever spun a drill or anything around an AM radio receiver you'll know how much motor how much noise the motor makes itself well this is doing the same thing they've done the best they can to shield it so it's got two caps on it and everything's all shielded and they've got suppression noise suppression under the chassis so there has to be that drop between the two so I imagine you know taking it from you know 32 all the way down to 24 so there is quite a bit of drop use these are rated a bit higher than 24 so we'll take a look at that here in just a little bit the eye tube is supposed to go in here see there's supposed to be an eye that's missing so I'll have to grab an eye tube as well now I notice that a lot of the filaments here it's six H six and what does this one say 6sq seven the one that's missing is a 6k eight with the cap here so they are probably running some of the filaments in series so if one of the tubes go out I would imagine that a whole bunch of them don't light up so there's probably a few different strings this one here is a 35 l6 this will be the output tube which will drive the audio transformer down here so output tube audio transformer it'll drive the speaker so this one is obviously connected directly to the line now there's a piece of tape down here that says 35 l6 so somebody may have swapped that out at some time with another tube who knows not to bend this back up so I can put the I tube in there if you just do that right now kind of there something like that and then the I tube will just get clipped in there when we put the I tube back in so as you can see and that's looking pretty rough let's back this out just a bit so this is our tuning it says speaker off and on and this is a limiter so noise limiter feeling kind of spongy fuse six amp fuse volume that would be the on/off and volume broadcast and marine it's on marine right now so we'll have to move that to broadcast probably have to move this around a bunch of times I'll show you the bottom here in just a moment you'll know what I mean and this would be the crystal selector which would select the crystals that are missing over here so all the crystals have been pulled out at some time and she's just hanging here it's kind of shiny and the crystal sockets are all dirty so I imagine maybe this was just laying on top of this protecting that and somebody's taking the crystals out a long time ago now there's no point in trying to listen to the marine band because Marine Band has moved since way back when this is 1945 right so we wouldn't really hear anything anyways but it will receive the broadcast band and that's what we will try to take a listen to let's see what else is pilot light so this again would be there crystal selector and let's take a look at the bottom side what are we up against the yuck well we're up against some fun that's what we're up against a light on that so it's looking pretty ugly under here I don't see any modern components I see capacitors that have got cracks in them so this one here says hunts metallized that's interesting so metallized interesting to see this thing leaks maybe later on I'll open one end and just see them so it looks like it could be all original I don't know if these are original but it there all over the place I see you're here here and here it looks to be so maybe they are and everything is looking pretty dirty should be fun to see if this thing starts up let's take a closer look at those caps zoom in zoom on in to these caps here look at that our light on that nose are looking pretty scary I don't know if this one has any cracks in it let's see ya know metallized as well very interesting lots of dirt in there looks like an early couplet or something right here don't want to move that around really don't want to move much of anything inside here I shouldn't even be moving this we want to see if this thing is gonna work me even moving this if I tried to move those capacitors I'm sure that if they're not sure that they will be so I'm not gonna touch anything we want to see if this thing is gonna fire up just the way it is so that's a look at the underside all the controls are real dirty see that there and the band switch back I said just a little bit the band switches on this thing are just brutal marine and broadcast not many positions but look in pretty ugly so this is the filtering for the Dyna motor here lots of filtering down there and they were most likely be some up in here as well so yeah trying to keep the buzzing and humming out of the radio receiver so hopefully it receives more than the noise from the Dyna motor should be lots of fun here's the power supply that I'm going to be using so it's a pretty big power supply has two huge handles on the side I don't know this thing has got to weigh a hundred plus pounds this is a very very heavy power supply so it's linear and it's nice it's nothing special about it a bunch of rectifiers and capacitors is none of this fancy regulated stuff with pass elements or anything like that it's you turn this which feels to be a very act I've never been inside this thing so this feels to be a very act of some sort and that's just gonna be turning up a transform or something there's a lot of iron in that thing I can tell you that there's got to be a big transformer inside this thing this is one of the things that I'm going to end up restoring down the road seems to work right now I'll end up going through this thing together as well maybe just even for curiosity's sake we'll just open the thing up and take a look inside here in the future I can't tell you how heavy that is a thing is ridiculous one of the heaviest mobile power supplies because you could call it mobile is it big handles on the sides one of the heaviest mobile power supplies that I have so ridiculously heavy so what we need to do is we need to figure out what wires do what in this thing so that we can feed this thing some current to make this thing spin I think that's what we'll try first don't bother putting any other tubes in this it don't have any other you know it's a tube missing over here and the AI tube is missing so we'll worry about that later let's just see if the Dyna motor works first so the first thing I need to do is figure out the wire out to this socket here so flip that up like so try and get a light into the shots okay so there's a whole bunch of wires going into this hole right here and that rate there is of interest right now because that's what we need to figure out I'm just gonna lower the camera here a bit so if I can get a better angle on what's going on here maybe zoom in just a little bit so we obviously know this coax so this is gonna be the signal lead and if we take a look at the signal lead the shield from the coax is running to here okay and we see one wire running from here to a pin as well so we're gonna have a direct short to the chassis from one of these pins and that's gonna most likely be the negative or the ground for this radio so we'll look at that in a moment so we have a coax we have a ground so then we really only have three connections left so this one here is running over here so one of these is gonna run up to the fuse as we see here and then to the switch same color lead alright so if you turn this just turning the switch here on the front so that's obviously going to be switched so we should be able to find the dynamo door lead just by doing that so we'll use that just to get us going so we know that we're gonna have a ground of the chassis that's simple so technically there the ground of the power supply over here we'll just render the chassis and we just need to figure out the hot lead and that looks like it's this other lead over here so the two posts that are side by side we can see a wire running in here straight into a post and a wire running or you'd over here straight into a post and it's the too far back pins okay so well recall you can double check that that looks to be the camera here again so you can see what I'm talking about looks to be these two pins in the back right here and then we have the coax which is running into this side which should be this one here so this should be the antenna post and we have these two which are undetermined at this point and we'll worry about that in just a little bit so what I'll do is I'll turn this thing on and we'll go here so I'll cloak this two chassis like so so I've just got the ground of my meter it's on resistance right now you can see has just clipped to the chassis a little bit more light on the subject there and try and get this all into the shot I think I'm just gonna have to back things out just a little bit here glare the light off that okay so let's test these pins right here so we've got four ohms probably reading the resistance of these leads yeah okay so then we can count that as a short I haven't zeroed this out okay so we have three ohms here and if I move the where is it on the front side this one nothing happens and I'll move it over to the other one so we have that and then I'll turn it on and there we go turns on so we definitely know that this is going to be positive where I have the red lead right now and the one right beside it is going to be negative so that's nice and easy now what I want to do is attach power supply so I'll move this out and lift this up here a little bit and try and get everything happening here get the light out of the shot and move this back just a hair so you can see everything that's going on here okay so I got a bunch of leads on the top here I'll just untangle these and plug them in so negative yeah applause I don't want to make sure that this is right down at the bottom so positive here it's nice that they have poles it's not the other way around so stick these right onto the poles and away we go yeah I don't know if I left this on or off I'll find out here real quick yep it's still off so no these I'll turn this on like so well that's a nice sign that supposed to be 32 volts and as you can hear that's pretty loud so I'm just gonna move the mic away from that so you don't have to listen to that so incredibly loud that's the Dyna motor or ad air making all that noise so this thing is spinning right now which is a good sign so the next thing that I need to do and I can see a tube lighting up that one's directly to the line see that lighting up over there so the next thing I want to do is when you shut this off well that's a good sign the Dyna motor works so that's quite a bit of a battle right out of the way right there that is nice it sounds healthy too so okay so the Dynamo to work so now what I need to do is I need to go get this tube down here into the bottom of the chassis here I don't know if you can see that I'll try and zoom on in it's nice that they punch this into the chassis right there it says 6 K 8 that's what I'm gonna be getting this is an AI tube and these are all real standard if you've been working on radios for a while you'll understand that that socket is either a 6 g 5 a 6 e 5 a 6 u 5 one of those variants so the 65 is nice and sensitive so they'll grab a 65 for this thing here and that'll also be a good indication if we're actually getting any high voltage the 65 will glow green if we're getting any high voltage so 65 this do we need anything else I think I think that's gonna get us started I think that's all it needs just this is a 65 and this one tube here so what I'll do is I'll go grab a couple of tubes pop them in and we'll turn the thing back on again and see if we have any high voltage okay I've got a couple of new tubes here so I'll plug these in this is the I tube so there's no point in putting it around the front rate now I mean as well just lay it over the chassis like this so we can look at it in fact I'll just hold that and want the go on that to get dropped or anything I'll put that out of the way for now and I'll plug this other one in here which is the 6k which is a mixer tube that is definitely an important tube to have in the radio okay let's see what happens there's any kind of life going on here can hear bogging down that means that the tubes are warming up so it is feeding at high voltage this is taking an awful long time to glow oh there it is it's coming look at that Wow with all those cracked capacitors on the bottom I figured that there'd be something that I'm gonna need to be opening up so far so good it's bright I tube I'll just leave that there stay and I will go grab a feast coax and put it onto the antenna post up over here it's been hooked or something else and it was this one a straight up and down and this is the ground definitely don't want that to be knocking anything I'm just going to move this around like so oh it's looking like they eye angle closed as I put that antenna connector around here it's definitely trying to receive something I don't if you can see that it's really bright hopefully you can actually gonna probably need to knock this down and brightness just a hair and that's a little too far let's try that one or maybe than that one there we go so if I attach the antenna post to hear that see that trying to receive but nothing's coming out of the speaker so I'll attach this here and I'm just going to lay that they're so speaker is on this is over here yeah right back up again so it is on there that's full volume but nothing's coming out of the speaker now a lot of the times what they did way back in the day is they would put a speaker mute because usually there's a transmitter around and when you transmit so you grab the microphone and you key up the microphone if you're close to the radio speaker you get a squeal so they would have a switch that would either open or close the speaker line to ground and I'm imagining that that's probably what's happening here so I'm just gonna go and grab another jumper clip from the other side like so and I want to make sure that there's no high voltage on those pins that they're not running any high voltage out before I do anything [Music] this meter right here as you can see this is very much just on the fly that's all but this here that's in there good all right here and here that's on the sea so I just want to make sure that there's no direct current and high voltage on any of these pins here I'm bogged down a little bit there one of those capacitors might be trying to go away and there isn't there's no high voltage on any of these okay so that's good okay so now what I want to do is see if I can find that because there's no high voltage or anything on that right now I want to see if I can find any turn the volume up make sure the speaker is on that would help wouldn't it you're not looking too good right now under your let's see here we've got everything this is a limiter off this is that full speaker hopefully the yeah it's trying to receive there might be portions of this that that may not be working okay so I'm not getting anything yet so what I want to do right now it's very quick and easy test so I want to see if any of the tubes are cold because if they're cold that means that the heater isn't working inside the vacuum tube so what I'll do is I'll just move the camera here pardon the movement get this kind of looking down tubes here so there is a tube here and it is warm okay you know what I'm gonna do to make this even more is they'll grab my Fleur and let's see if we can see anything here hopefully this isn't gonna be too incredibly close and I'm gonna be able to see what's going on okay so you can see that so this tube is warm so that's the new tube nice and warm that's the 6h 6 it's dead cold and see all the tubes are hot except this one right here this tube is dead cold so what I'll do is yeah it's just as cold as the chassis so take that out and I will go grab another 6h 6 and I'll be back in a moment ok another 6h 6 kind of a cute looking little miniature metal tube I'll put that in there immediately for a second heard the Dynamo go down just a little bit so it is drawing filament current which is a good thing so this is just this is frozen this one so you can see my fingers and see that so I'm not sure if this is gonna get warm that quick it's are we gonna take a little bit to get warm this one here now so we'll just leave that alone I won't worry about that I don't think I'll be able to feel anything yet yeah that's still pretty cool so these things are just a little diodes there's two diodes inside here so they're used for detectors so I'll just move this back over here again I'm careful with that I tube okay so we want to see if any of that is the speaker mute again so got this on that's up full a try again still nothing happened then I wonder for my replacement 6h 6 it should because it dragged it down a little bit let's see if we can see any heat action coming from the 686 yeah you can see it just starting to blow now say stim down here so the 6h 6 is in there just no action so this back and forth a bunch of times remember this thing's been in a barn right so that this around see it's trying to receive because we can definitely see what's happening with the with the eye right that from the coax see that so whether it's just receiving the Dynamo noise that back on there and speaker is just not making any noise whatsoever so we might need to do some tracing here is the dynamo turn oh he's driving you nuts yet distinct they had to listen to this all the time of course this would be in a case and it wouldn't be that bad 'not have good rubber mounts but be a little less - try one more time here speaker ground it's well there we go [Music] maybe if I give us a ground it's probably picking it up if that earlier of this launch that's a great people to play if Indy look at that well and know that not only is a profession ethically leverage national balance Wow look at that almost crack capacitors on the bottom and everything it's alive women are not doing too much maybe it's to be another officer comes running in and tackled him and then punch nobody looked at him pretty good strength there that's pretty good feed up the first hole and then [Laughter] so it could definitely use a tune-up and all that I'll just shut this thing off I like the way that sounds as it kind of winds down so amazing nothing is really not there's no tuning the thing has old capacitors is broken parts really in the bottom nothing's been done to it and it's receiving from 1945 that's really quite amazing so what do you think leave your comments below do you think we should actually go through and restore this thing and see how well we can make it receive what do you think I read every single comment so feel free to leave your comments below and if there's enough people interested in seeing this thing being restored back to its you know original type of condition I'll take this thing on and it'll become a restoration video thanks for stopping by lab number two today hope you enjoyed this video if you are enjoying my videos you can let me know by giving me a big thumbs up and hang around there'll be more videos like this coming in the near future there's a lot of restorations to be done here in lab number two and in lab number one there's a lot of solid-state restorations coming as well a lot of really neat stuff on the horizon here I've got a years of backlog here going on so lots and lots of neat equipment coming if you want to be notified as soon as I post a new video don't forget to subscribe and tap that Bell symbol that way as soon as I post a video you'll get a notification and you can check it out right away if you're interested in taking your electronics knowledge to the next level and learning electronics in a very different and effective way gaining access to at this point right here just about another hundred videos and gaining access to many of my personal inventions and designs you're definitely gonna want to check out my ongoing electronics course on patreon I'll put the link just below the video's description under the show more tab and I'll also pin the link rate at the top of the comments section see if you click on the link it'll take you right there alright until next time take care bye for now you

Channel: Mr Carlson's Lab

Views: 609,858

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Id: GD-b5zbYMBI

Length: 32min 15sec (1935 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020