Grigsby-Grunow MAJESTIC 132 Radio Repair - The Finale

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Amateur Repair Time. This is going to be the last video on this Grinsby Grinnell Majestic radio that I've been working on forever. This is the fifth video on it. I've been screwing around with it for about a year and a half here on and off. Grigsby Grinnell. This is a really cool radio. By the end of the video, hopefully we'll see it all completed and done. It's actually so tall though, I'm not going to leave it here in my office. I'm going to put it in another room because it's just so big. But I'm going to try to go through this video pretty quick. So by the end of it, it'll be finished. So if I get too far into it, I'll just cut a bunch of stuff out and just, I've got to finish it on this video. This is the fifth video. It's been really fun working on it. I've been learning a lot. And on the last video, we did one video where we worked on the cabinet a little bit. There was a broken stretcher on the leg. We made a new one with a CNC machine. We did a video where we just looked at the chassis and started messing with it. And there's a complete rat's nest inside where it had been worked on over the years. There were some deteriorated wires. We did a video where we did some different cap things on it. And then on the last video, we finished up testing resistors, swapping the electrolytic caps, the filter caps, and got it where she came on. Well, what we're going to do on this video is test our voltages on everything. Just make sure everything's right, button it all back together, figure out how to align it, and go from there. I wasn't able to test the tubes because I don't have a tube tester that's old enough to test those tubes. This thing was made in, I believe, 1930, possibly 1929. But I will say, I am four miles from the towers of WBT, which is a clear channel station, so it's really strong. And I messed around with the dial, got it to 1110. And we're getting something. So I mean, it is picking up. I don't even have the antenna hooked up to it right now. So hopefully we'll get that sounded a lot better here in a few minutes. But it sounds like it's going to have plenty of amplification too. All right. So the first thing I want to do though, is I want to check some of these voltages just to see if everything's in the ballpark, and then we can button it up. It's sitting at, you know, 0.8 of an amp. 820 or so, 810, 820 milliamps. And it's running on 122 volts. That's my wall voltage here. I've got it on a Varitran, but I adjusted it till it's exactly the same as the wall voltage. I've got a jumper set on it to set it for 125. The transformer allows you to pick 105, 115, or 125. I went ahead and bumped it up to 125, which is going to lower the outputs a little bit. I don't completely know what the voltages are supposed to be. This is so old that they don't show you all the voltages like they do on a lot of the more, slightly more modern schematics. But we do have this, which shows some of it. So this is a physical schematic of this area of the radio, and it lists these little lugs here, and a few of them have voltages on them. So I want to check those, and then if there is a problem, or one's way off, maybe we can look in that section and figure out what's going on with that. But I think we're probably going to be pretty good. So let me get a tripod, and we'll test some voltages and see what we've got. All right, so like I said, we've got just a few voltages listed here, and the grounds are relative to the chassis, and it's turned on. We're getting something, there's just no antenna hooked up yet. That's coming, coming soon, coming soon. All right, so let's see what we've got here. So this says 2.5 volts. I do not have the indicator light installed either, which may actually change some of this, because that is a load, you know. Let's set this up properly, and that'll work for these small voltages. This is actually backwards too, but it's upside down. I've got, basically I've got the chassis upside down. 2.5, but I've got 1.2. Hmm, hmm. All right, well, we'll write her down, and then we'll see if we can figure out what's going on. Oh, you know what? It says 2.5, the one right next to it says 2.5 as well. Let's see if I can figure out where that's coming from. It's coming from the transformer. Uh, yeah, so that should actually be, I'm measuring DC, that's the whole problem. No, I'm on AC. That should be measured relative to the one next to it. 2.5, there we go. All right, that makes more sense. All right, 2.5. So what is 2.5? That is, what are they doing with that? That's coming right off the transformer, and it's a two white wires, I guess that is. I think that is just, you know, our filament voltage, but I mean, obviously, but there's two of them. So I think that's probably the filament voltage for the G24s and also for the pilot lamp. The pilot lamp says 3.2 volts. I don't, I don't even know if I've got anything like that, but I'll get something like that because we got to have it light up. Okay, and then, um, the two next to it appear to also say 2.5 volts, but they're a different winding of the transformer. So let's see. Don't you just love it when it's on AC and it's just walking away like that a little bit? It makes you wonder how accurate it is on your 2.5 that you're trying to figure out here. 2.5. So that's correct as well. Very cool. All right, so our next one says power 306 volts. Oh, it's a scary one. What do you think? How close are we going to be? That's going to be a rectified voltage. DC. We're getting there folks. This is amateur repair time. 292. 292. This says, uh, 306. So just slightly low, which I'm happy with. I'd rather it be low than high. And I did, I did set it for 125 as opposed to 122 with, you know, the line voltage is 122. So I, my choices are 110, 115, 105, 115, and 125. I went ahead and set it for 125 because at my shop, for instance, the line voltage is like 126 volts, which is high as hell as far as I'm concerned. But, um, you know, if you set, if you set that jumper higher, your outputs are all going to be slightly lower, which again, I'm no expert, but I would rather it be slightly low than slightly high. Another thing too, is these filter caps that I put in, look at these little tiny, these are two microfarad filter caps. One, two, and there's a third one there. Um, they're 400 volts. So it'd be better if those were a little higher, but they're electrolytics and that's the ones I had. So, um, so again, I'm running 292 at it. That's good, right? All right. And then next to that, it says bias voltage, three volts. I assume that's also DC. DC. That's this one. Okay. Let's change the meter. I just like this old meter. Sometimes it gives me fits. You know, really you shouldn't mess around with a meter. I probably ought to just start using a better one. Not that there's anything wrong with this one, but you do want good, uh, measurements. 2.43. I wonder if that's adjustable in any way. Instead of three, it's 2.43. Okay. Uh, the next lug is a ground and then it says junction and then it says line. Yeah. And primary. So that's these, uh, two here that are running to the, the, uh, switch, the one off switch. But there was something else that was marked on here. Let me see. Yeah. Here's a couple more. Okay. So, uh, this says 180 volts, one, two, and third RF plates. Why would they say one, two, and third must say one, something, two, and third. Why would they write it that way? Okay. So, uh, RF plate voltage is the top of that resistor. Let's change our, uh, range again. 186. They're calling for I think it says 180, 186. So I found just messing with them a little bit again. I'm not an expert. I hate, I hate, I know y'all get tired of me saying that, but I'm just thinking out loud. I found in the few that I have messed with that the tube, depending on the wear of the tube, it will change voltages surrounding that tube. So if you, if you plug in a, you plug in a tube, that voltage might be 186. You take a tube out and plug another one in, it might be 175. There's a little variance depending on what tube you've got installed. And it's not because it's the source of the voltage. It's sometimes it's because it's just the, I guess how leaky the tube is or how, if that's even a thing or, or just how, um, how that tube's functioning, what level it's functioning at. So 186, that seems like it's ballpark. I mean, we're, what's that 5% off? Not even that. That's about three and a half percent off. I think that's pretty good. Uh, the resistors are all, you know, if you're in within 20, you're good. So that's pretty good. And also that resistor there is supposed to be 5,230 ohms, but it's 6,110 ohms, this one. So it's a little high. Um, so that would be to be expected, I suppose. Okay. And then we've got the detector plate voltage next to it. It's telling me it wants 275, 264. Great. 264. All right. Well, I'll tell you what I think, folks. I think, uh, there's no tuning in the bottom of it here. There's nothing to do in the bottom anymore. So I'm going to go ahead and put the plate back on. I'm gonna clean it up as best I can. Uh, there's just a little bit of debris in the bottom of it there where I've been working on it. Um, right. Um, I'm gonna clean it up a little bit and then I'm gonna slap the plate back on it and then we're done inside of it. And I am happy about that. Um, uh, so we've got to hook up the antenna and then we've got to see if I can figure out any way to align it. Um, I'm going to have to read up on that because I don't want to screw around with the alignment. You know, if we hook up an antenna and it works, we're just going to leave it like it probably. But I'd like to at least read how you're supposed to align it. Okay. So got the bottom back on it. There's a bunch of screws missing, but it was like that when I took it off. Um, I don't think it really matters. It's kind of overkill. There's one, two, three, four, five, 10, 12, 15 screws holding the bottom on it that the, that the 80 pound movement is just sitting on top of the whole time anyways. And there's a lip to hold it in place, but what great quality construction. Now, um, kind of the reason they did that is because of the way the cabinets constructed. If you look, it's got these stretchers on the bottom and then, uh, it's of course sits right there. Well, from the front, you can just, since, since it's a tall boy, you can just, you know, a kid or something could just reach right under it. And without this plate would, um, so yeah, I don't, I think we'll leave it out of the cabinet for now because the antenna isn't a concern because there is no antenna. So, um, you know, whenever you, whenever you work on the smaller ones, you're supposed to do these, you're supposed to mount the antenna similar to how it will be mounted in the cabinet. But this one doesn't have an internal antenna or any antenna in the cabinet. Um, but I think that is the next thing we're going to look at is the antenna. So let me show you what it, what that shows on the schematic. So there's the speaker that's got its own little weird thing going on. We'll look at here in a minute. Um, here's the chassis I'll put back together, put the plate back on. Um, so on the There is on the cabinet, there is a nice little switch on the side for local and distance open for distance closed for local. So I guess they're saying if you've connected a badass antenna, a nice antenna, um, this will, this switch will be open, which means that this wire will not be connected to this wire. This wire is connected to ground. Now on our particular one, they actually have a 52 ohm resistor wired, uh, in series on this. So it's never connected directly to ground. It's connected to ground through a 52 ohm resistor. But the way I've got it right now is this is disconnected. So this is the extent of our antenna. It's that, and it's not even connected to anything. And I'm still picking up just a little, the bareless, you can barely hear, um, you can barely hear WBT off in the distance. Um, there was also an adjustment on the back of the chassis for the, um, antenna, you know, like usually you have a little, there's a, um, a screw adjustment for the antenna. So, uh, I think the first thing to do is to just jumper this to this. I've got it out of the cabinet, so it won't quite reach the way it is right now, but just jumper this to this, which effectively will turn this switch on basically. And then just see if the reception gets a lot better because you're grounding that antenna connection, I guess, right? Um, instead of just leaving it completely open where it's not connected to anything. And then after that, we can try connecting a big long wire to here as well, and just throwing it across the floor and seeing what happens, um, and just see what kind of reception we get. And if it sounds pretty good, we'll just leave it like that. But if it doesn't sound good, there are adjustments. So we've got that one. And then we have four adjustments related to, uh, these G24 tubes that are in here. Um, I don't know how, I don't know which one does what though, you know, so I don't want to mess with it too much, but you can see them actually on the schematic right here. So this says five condenser gang, which I showed in the previous video, how all that looks in there. You're turning five different, um, um, tuning capacitors at the same time. And you know, usually on like a SuperHET set, you're turning three. Uh, and this, I don't think this is SuperHET though. I think this is, uh, um, TFR, isn't it? But I just don't know how those work. Um, so you've got one adjustment here, one here, one here, and one here. And then the final one is that antenna one on the back. So I think that's our only adjustments. I was talking about, could you adjust the bias voltage? I don't think you can. I don't believe there's any way to do that. I don't, um, yeah. All right. So yeah, let's, so let me do that. I'm just going to jump that for now and then we'll see if that gets our reception a lot better. So I've got a test jumper on it, which I guess is actually kind of similar to having a little bit of line on it. All right. And I've got it just plugged into the wall. Now let's see what happens. This on off switch, by the way, is just a straight up on off. It doesn't have a volume on it. It has a separate volume knob. Take us a second to warm up the tubes. And, uh, we should still be somewhere in the vicinity of WBT, which again is a clear channel station. So it should come in pretty good. I need to get the knob out so I can turn this easier. Let me get that knob. Look at how nice the knobs were on this thing. Look at that. It's majestic. Yeah, I can't get hardly anything without, with that antenna jumper like that. So. And I think all of the noise is just because we got it up so loud. I've got it pretty much all the way up and probably much quieter whenever we have a reasonable volume. Okay. So I'm going to get a wire and just attach it. I don't know if they're supposed to, I don't know if I can just attach a, I think I can just attach a wire to this one lug and just string it out and see what kind of reception we get on that. Okay. So I took some speaker wire. I had a big old roll of speaker wire and I just hooked one lead of the speaker wire to the antenna connection. There's the antenna and then the ground and then another ground here. So I have hooked one lead of an antenna wire of a speaker wire to that lead. This lead has nothing on it. And this is actually a third lead on the chassis. It doesn't have anything on it. See how there's three. So I hooked a roll of speaker wire to it and rolled it out about 30 feet. And I'm at least getting that one channel. So let's see what else we can get. Let's see if we get anything else. I never get a channel right above 1110. So this thing's going to be a, with that antenna, it's really going to pick up some stuff. But to be fair, I never have an antenna hooked up on the other ones. I just use the little internal antenna. Let's hear how it does down towards the other end of the dial. You know, that's the tricky part. There's usually a strong one at 800 something. The hell is that? So I want to get 650. Come on 650. So I think we need it. All right. Well, obviously it needs aligned. So I got to try to figure out how I'm going to do that. I also need to figure out what I'm going to do for an antenna. I've seen some people where they'll wrap an antenna inside the cabinet. I don't know if that's effective or not though. But let me see if I can find some information on how to best align it. Okay. It sounds pretty good if I get some music playing. You can crank this thing because it's got that huge speaker with that big old magnet on it. It actually sounds great. So what I've been doing is I looked up how to align it and most of the advice I saw was that basically all four of these are supposed to be tuned the same basically to the same frequency because it's not a super hit. And so they're basically saying you just tune it to a channel and peak it. Just turn each one until it's the loudest. Turn the antenna until it's the loudest, which is the one on the back. And then that's about as good as you're going to get. I'm sure there's a more scientifically correct way to do it, but that's what I did. And it's pretty good. But I'm not getting a ton of channels because I've just got this hokey little antenna wire hooked up. But what I want to try next is I've heard many people mention that if you got a good ground on it, you get better reception. So there is a ground post right there that is actually separate from the antenna. So I'm thinking about getting us a good ground on there. And where could I find a ground? Where can I hook a ground wire to to check and see if that helps the reception any? I was just kidding. People, did you really think I was just going to stick a wire in the freaking outlet here on my desk? You think I'm crazy or something? The lights are plugged in. No, I stuck it in the wall over there. And I got to say, it instantly cleaned up all of the reception. That is crazy. So it had all kinds of going on. I stuck a ground on that ground line and it got rid of all that noise. I mean, I can't believe that. Here, I'll just do it for you so you can hear it. So hear it? It just cleans it right up. Wow. All right. So I polished it up a little bit with some old English. Remember, we made that piece. It really needs to be stained and have like a lacquer on it. I stained it with what I had, but I didn't have anything dark enough. So I'm going to leave that for later. And I don't have my pilot light or my indicator light yet. Waiting on that, I ordered some. It's in pretty good shape, even after making that horrible fall. Cleaned right up. This side was a little rougher. I don't know what's going on there. I can't remember if that was the side on the ground or not. Let me think. Well, that side broke. So probably, right? If that would have broke, it must have fell this way. Let me show you the back of it. I don't have the ground hooked up and I don't have any antenna hooked up right now. Let me see if I can turn on a light. I want to show you a couple of labels and look, you can easily reach the light. So I'm just going to pop it in. This is a little, this is the back. The original back went right back on it. It's held on by all these little wood screws. When I got it at the auction, I had to take all those out. It took me about 30 minutes to get the thing out of my truck because I had to, I took it all apart. I took that out. It was laying on its side. So I took that out and I took the chassis out. This somebody has added. I think it's a tone knob. Let's see. There's something going. I think it, on some of the music, you can tell that it changes the tone slightly. It's hooked in to the speaker over to here. I don't have any schematics though to tell me what's going on with that, but I think that's what they're doing. It's some kind of tone thing. They just have these two wires running to this and as you turn it, it changes the relationship between those two wires. So that's what I would guess. Here's a little label. This is the label for the chassis itself. It would be cool to see what this says. Can't quite read it. Notice they're showing you the antenna adjustment. Boy, I'd love to read about that. Around a thousand kilocycles and adjust volume control for low volume. Then adjust the antenna compensating condenser by turning the black knob as indicated until maximum volume is blah, blah, blah. So we're on 1110 right now. They're saying around a thousand. I wonder if... I think it's doing that because I don't have the antenna hooked up and I don't have a ground plug If you back it out, you lower the volume. Pretty much the farther you go in, the louder it gets. Nobody wants to replace their roof. Restore it instead with Roof Max. Call 1-855-ROOF-MAX for a free roof inspection. I'm creating the antenna with my hand just by touching it. So once I get the ground hooked up and the antenna hooked up, it'll be better. But I'm going to move it into the other room. Also, here is the local and distant switch. So I'm really happy with it. It turned out a little better than I thought it would. So now we need the light. Hey, it's Bo Thompson for Window Nation. Hey, Bo Thompson. Window Nation's semi-annual sale. Buy four windows and get four windows free and a free entry door when you purchase a house full of windows. Plus, no money down, no entry. Well, I got it finished. ...until 2027. That's a whole lot of... I got the bulb in it. ...super smart investment when prices are going up. I went with a... number 42. This is a real bulb, people. Not those fake Chinese ones and not those leads. Don't do the leads, people. It's a bad idea. I think it ended up looking great. I mean, that's just a nice looking radio. I can see why they were expensive as heck back in the day. I've got a couple clocks here that I'm going to be doing eventually. So there you go. I hope you enjoyed it. Got it all doing its thing. It sounds great. It looks great. Now, here's what it looks like with the... We'll turn it up a little more so we can hear it behind those muffled doors. ...Ain't got no man. It takes a narrow way stage in a world premiere on May 10th. Beautiful. All right, so we'll do a before and after. This is the before. I mean, this is the after. I'll show you the before. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did like it, check here at the end. I'm going to put up this Silvertone that we did. If you enjoyed this series, you can watch the series that we did on the Silvertone. See you on the next one.