Cheap table radio grille cloths

[hermitcrab]

was in the local Joann fabric store with the wife , and I watched a store employees throwing out a bunch of stuff... one thing I noticed was a sample book of different fabrics on a big ring binder it was like 12 x 18 .... these are big enough to use on most table radios ... some are really gaudy ... but others are quite nice... just a idea for a cheap source of material....check the dumpsters!

[William]

Thanks, Elton. As we say around here, dumpster dinning which does not always mean food.

Bill

[electra225]

My wife has always enjoyed hotrodding the grill cloth on radios. I have a few small radios with busted cabinets. I want to fix the broken cabinets, hot rod the paint, then let the wife hotrod any grill cloth involved therein. I posted a picture awhile back of our old Sparton 880 with the dark red grill cloth. Some of the wife's handy work. You can take a dowdy brown bakelite cabinet, paint it a bright color or colors, and completely change its personality.

[TC Chris]

I've got a 1938 Philco table radio with a grille cloth from church upholstery. One of my brother's jobs on the way to becoming a doctor was in the church furniture factory, and he'd bring home upholstery cloth scraps they were throwing out. The grille is gold. Same color I used to recover the front seat on the '60 Rambler American. Some of the scraps were substantial. That clashed with the original green, so when I had the chance I re-re-covered it with some dark green Naugahyde from the great old surplus/fire sale store in Bay City, the Mill End.

Right now I'm looking at an old rocking chair that I upholstered in olive green church pew fabric.

In addition to the church furniture factory, my brother also worked as a garbage man for the city of East Lansing on the way to becoming a doc. I've still got a few items he snagged before they hit the landfill.

Chris Campbell

[hermitcrab]

I would never make it as a trash man.... I would end up backing the garbage truck up in my driveway at the end of the day and unloading things I thought would be treasures to me...before heading to the dump...

[electra225]

My wife keeps telling me I am auditioning for "Hoarders, Buried Alive" on a daily basis.

I couldn't be a junk man, either. I'd think everything was either restorable or I might need parts from it someday. I never could keep parts set radios around. I'd fix them instead, then I wouldn't want to break them up for parts.

[hermitcrab]

Me too... pick up a parts set ... then get home study it, and realize I can fix this...so I don't have too many parts floating around...

[Firedome]

I tend to buy parts units for my vintage appliances, so got free a washer for my '74 Frigidaire washer and saved everything but the metal cabinet, one part that won't go bad. Same for the '57 GE 40" double oven range, bought a spare for 35$ and stripped off everything but the cab, it's good to have some spares on hand for the old stuff!

[electra225]

In fairness, when you get a parts set, you need to get some kind of baseline on it to see which parts are still good. By the time you get a good baseline, many times, you have the item working. Then it's hard for me to break up a working device, whether I am in love with it or not.

[TC Chris]

Agreed about working (or even just intact) sets. I only part things out when they are badly damaged or missing essential parts, to the extent that restoration is highly unlikely ever. Working or fixable pieces are historical artifacts. They aren't making any more of them. It seems a shame to diminish the number further.

Somebody gave me a Western Electric amplifier chassis. Two big transformers; ceramic tube sockets; P-P 6L6 output tube and a couple preamp tubes. Long ago I stripped off the transformers and the tube sockets because I needed the sockets. It was in a fit of downsizing. Years later I began reading about W-E amps and started wondering what I had. Then I could not find the chassis so I assumed I had thrown it into the pickup when I was recycling before my move. Last fall I found the chassis in my distant storage unit. I had other concerns at that moment but I need to see f it's worth putting back together. K've never been able to find info using the W-E transformer numbers. Do we have any W-E amp experts here?

Chris Campbell

[Firedome]

Heck YES it's worth putting back together!! A guy named Walt in VA used to be the WE guru, he's the guy who used to publish a little "flyer" called AudioMart every other month back in the pre-'net days (rememeber those?) to provide a marketplace for esoteric audio stuff. You actually had to be recommended by a current "member" to get approval from Walt to get a subscription. I got one thru Charlie K at VTV and the most amazing stuff would turn up for sale, and of course Walt saw it first. He managed to accumulate an incredible amount of WE stuff, much of it later went to Japan &c where they go bonkers for it. ANYTHING WE: wire, parts, just crazy for it. Many of the amps went there and they pay insane prices, 5 figures not out of the question. WE amps usually had the KS (Kearney Standard) prefix model #s of all WE telephone equipment. Of course the 300b ones are the most sought but that's like saying do you want Gold or Platinum. Walt died about 15 yrs ago, and his stuff got dispersed to the winds, mostly to the East. So If you don't want to bother with restoring it Chris (just think of all that work!), as a personal favor I'll be happy to take it off your hands! LOL.

[TC Chris]

I don't have the transformer part nos. at hand but I do recall the KS prefix. I had posted inquiries all over the internet to see what they are and nobody ever knew. I need an expert! I still have the chassis, and the parts I removed (ceramic tube sockets, transformers). When I took it apart, it was pre-internet and I assumed it was telephone equipment of some kind. Now P-P 6L6 smells more like audio.

Chris Campbell

[Firedome]

I can probably find an ID and schematic if you send any #s you have and pics, eMail direct to my "firesweep" eMail.
All the 6L6 WE amps I've seen were originally line repeater/booster amps. afaik WE's theater amps were afaik their only purely dedicated audio amps, theater Altec 287 amps were more-or-less an evolved WE amp that were originally used with huge wood horns + compression driver and field-coil woofers. They were huge vertical rack units about 7 ft high and used 845 or 805 and mercury-vapor rectifier tubes. The 6L6 based Altec was the A-127. The stuff that guys in Japan and Hong Kong are using were telephone=based equipment with limited bandwidth that are not really ideal for music but they like to use them with vintage horns to listen to period jazz. It's all sort of a cult that was started by a Japanese-French guy named Jean Hiraga back in the early'70s. They were scarfing up the really rare stuff while selling us disposable Pioneer and Technics and the like. A number of them have built new clones of WE amps at great expense, you occasionally see them on eBay.

[Firedome]

I'm in VT right now but home by Tuesday, all my notes and files are there. I'll have to look up the KS numbers but off the top of my head WE 6L6 PP line amps I recall seeing from time-to-time were WE 124 and WE 142, I don't recall the KS #s or the rest of the tube line ups. Another was a McIntosh-built-for-WE amp that looked a lot like the output-chassis section (it also had a power-supply chassis) of a Mc K-107 (MI-200), I had one once, but Mc's version used 8005 tubes. I the the WE-Mc version (don't recall the #) may have been a mod of that and it did use 6L6 (metal) tubes. All of these were flat mount units, not vertical style like the WE and Altec theater amps. (Altec stood for the All Technical Services Division of WE and was spun off around 1940). One feature helpful to know is if it has potted or un-potted transformers. Various models tended to have one or the other. The WE nomenclature for 6L6 was WE-350B btw.