I attended the Michigan Antique Radio Club's annual Winter show earlier today with my friends Sean, WX8L and Mark, N8IAJ. Always a decent show that seems to always be accompanied by bitter cold weather, the turn-out today was the best I can recall, helped, no doubt, by temperatures in the upper 40s and rare Michigan Winter Sunshine. That always puts me in the mood to purchase some really nasty derelict to put right over the remaining Winter evenings, and there was lots of potential fodder at this show!
For these projects, I look for the stuff that most sane people would consider too far gone. I don't know why, I guess I'm just at the point where I've gotten bored with "normal" repairs - I mean, after 40 years and too many capacitor replacement jobs to remember, I like the challenge of taking on something that's really screwed-up.
And I found it: A trashed Echophone EC-1B for the outrageous price of $10. How could I say no?
I don't know much of the Hallicrafters/Echophone back story, but Hallicrafters manufactured the EC-1 under the Echophone name during WWII and marketed them heavily toward those serving in the military, with many of the advertisments featuring Private Hogarth, who, to me, looks a lot like Radar from the M*A*S*H* series. Evidently, the EC-1 made ol' Hogarth a hit with the ladies. Yep, nothing get's the estrogen frothing like an inexpensive shortwave radio.
Anyway.... I get somewhat nostalgic over the EC-1B because it's essentially the same as the Hallicrafters S-41G, one of which I spent many hours listening to when I was about 12. Unfortunately, that radio succumbed to my overestimation of my technical skills at the time; I took it apart and never put it back together. So, I've been looking for another for some time, but all that I've found were either hopelessly rusted (for some reason, these sets are prone to rust) or priced beyond what I wanted to spend.
So, when I saw that this one, in spite of being rough, was fairly rust free, even the bodged electrolytics dangling from the chassis didn't dissuade me from making the purchase.
Looking at it from below deck, it's relationship to the later S-38 series is obvious. Like the original '38, it's a six-tube transformerless superhet that covers from 540 KHz to 30 MHz in three bands. Unlike the '38s with a letter suffix, it has a "real" BFO based around a 12SQ7 in a Hartley circuit that works reasonably well. Where it differs from the '38 is the bandspread circuit; the '38 used a separate section on the tuning cap, where the EC-1B/S-41G(W) used a somewhat hokey variable inductance scheme; a powdered iron "slug" is moved through the tube containing the oscillator inductors by a series of strings and pulleys. Kind of a Rube Goldberg arrangement, but it works well enough and allowed them to keep the costs down by using a standard broadcast tuning cap.
As you can see in the photo, this set suffers from some pretty poorly executed attempts at repair, which, apparently, caused some pretty serious release of the magic smoke:
Since these sets are simple, it only took a couple hours to set things right; I replaced the filters in a safe and professional manner, and replaced all of the old waxed-paper caps and a couple of out-of-spec resistors. Once that was done, I powered the set and was rewarded with loud and clear reception on the local broadcast and shortwave bands. Cool!
There were a few other problems, but none terribly serious. The volume pot was open at the ground end, so I replaced it with one from my stash. The audio was also intermittent, which was caused by a broken connection at the base of the 35L6 tube, so I replaced that as well. The most perplexing problem was the BFO - it was oscillating at about 1.5 MHz! The BFO coil had been replaced with the wrong value, but no big deal, I just added some parallel capacitance to bring the circuit into range and it's working well.
Imperfect as these rigs are, they're pretty hard to kill. I think I've got about three hours into this one and it's already playing like a champ, but there's still more to do:
- Dial drive needs serious cleaning and re-lubrication.
- Bottom panel is missing; will make one out of 20ga steel.
- Finish is poor - will repaint and apply new decals (already ordered from Radio Daze).
- Chassis isolation grommets need replacement.
- Need to make or source a new rear cover.
So, yeah, I'll have a lot of time and a few bucks into a receiver that's not really cut-out for actual ham-band use, but it's all about the fun of breathing life into something that's long been left for dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment