Firestone Air Chief Antique Radio S-7403-6

Описание: Here I pulled another radio that's been collecting dust on my shelf to finally take a look at. It's a Firestone "Air Chief" S-7403-6 standard AM broadcast band radio.

On first glance, the power cord was a wreck, and it looked it be 100% original inside. Somebody had written the tube names in pencil on the chassis so I'm not 100% on that, though. I went ahead and replaced all the wax-paper capacitors (some were literally melting!). The rubber wire insulation on the IF coils was literally falling off in chunks, and rather than open up the cans and try to replace the wiring, I chose a different solution which you'll see. It appears to have worked well.

However when I first powered it up.... nothing. Took me quite a bit of poking and testing to figure out that, yeah, I'd make another rookie mistake. Another lesson I guess.

The cabinet isn't great, but that'll have to wait for another episode.

(Also if you wonder why I only tested 4 tubes instead of all 5, I stupidly tested the wrong output tube, a 50L6 lying on the bench from a different project!(!) I caught this when I was installing the tubes, but I'd already tested the correct 35L6GT output so I just chucked it in there.

Schematic: https://www.nostalgiaair.org/pdfs/Fir...

Heat Shrink Tube (Spoilers!) https://amzn.to/3H4K3aa (aff link)
Hakko FX-888 Soldering Iron: https://amzn.to/4mnWIVM

https://ripptech.com/
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bksy: rippc