All The Tubes Are Missing In This Canadian Made 1953 RCA Victor Clock Radio!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Amateur Repair Time. I've got a RCA Victor clock radio here that a friend of mine wants me to fix for him, if possible. He's an older gentleman, and he said that he wants, he doesn't have a loud radio, and this is the one that he picked out and thought it would be a loud radio. So I told him I would see what I could do. Now he plugged it in right in front of me which you know you're not really supposed to do but he did and it looked like the clock worked but the radio did not work which is better than the radio working and the clock not working because the clocks are a little harder to fix. So yeah so I guess we can do it again. I mean it's not gonna hurt it any worse than it hurt it whenever he plugged it up. Let's see what she does. I sat there and watched him do it and I was like that's not really how I would have done it but hey it'll be all right. The clock is tick, tick, ticking along. That's kind of strange how they did the hands on this one. I mean, they're white, so they kind of blend in, but the alarm hand doesn't blend in. So it's kind of weird. You'd think that would have maybe made the alarm hand a lighter color than the rest, a darker color. But what do I know? I'm not into design. So he couldn't get the radio to do anything. So we got to figure that out. We couldn't even figure out how you were supposed to get the radio to do anything. This says volume control. There's no humming or anything going on. So it's just dead, Fred. Okay, now this says alarm set, and this says time set. And so you can, it says auto radio on and off. I guess that's on. Okay. Radio off, auto on. So we may have not even, I didn't mess with it. He was messing with it. We may have not even had the radio on or whatever. He was, nothing. And we haven't looked in it yet. RCA Victor. That's a little better. Let's check out the backup. It's in pretty good shape, right? It's a C503 made in Canada. RCA Victor Company Limited, Montreal. 105 to 125 volts. It's not that picky, folks. 0.35 amps. Caution. Disconnect power cord from outlet before removing chassis from cabinet. Outlet for appliance. 105 to 120 volts AC. 60 watts. No, 660 watts maximum. 5 amps at 120. Am I doing that math right? I guess that's, yeah, if they say so. All right, so let me turn it off. Let me unplug it and then take that back cover off, and we'll see what's inside the thing. So I took these two little rivet things out. But look, it's made in Canada. Look, apparently they use Robertson bits in Canada. I always heard that. I heard that old man Robertson and old man Phillips got in a big fight and sued the hell out of each other. And Philips became the standard in America, and Robertson became the standard in Canada. And look, it's proof. Clearly, that's what's going on here. In Canada, they probably never see a Philips bit on anything. But I got just the right thing for that. I was at an antique mall a couple weeks ago, and they were selling tools real cheap. I think I paid a dollar apiece for these. They're made by Ace. And look, I was trying to show Donnie this, but I don't know if he caught what I was saying. It says, it says fits number 12 through number 14 and a quarter inch screw, but it's a Robertson bit. So they don't say anything about, like in the United States, if they said it fits a screw, they mean a Phillips bit or something, you know? So since this, you know, is just the Robertson bit, these must be made in Canada. So it was a set of three of them. I don't know how many would have been in the set. I don't know how many different ones there are. I just got these like a couple weeks ago. Look at that. I actually needed them. Ain't that something? Let's see if it fits. Look at that. Old man Robertson's idea is still working just fine. I mean, I like the novelty of it, but to be honest, I think I'm just saying, I feel it's obviously better. You got to be careful with that so we don't rip it up. So, you know, I think what they intend for you to do is slide the chassis out with this still attached to it, I think. Well, I know why it's not working. There's no tubes in it. Somebody stole the- Why would, come on people, why would you steal the tubes? Why would they do that? So I think I'll slide new tubes in it and we'll just see if the sucker works with tubes in it. All right, so the label's still on the bottom. This tube is actually still in it, the 12AV6. Now who knows if any of them are any good or if that one's any good. So I need a 12BA6, a 12BE6, a 50C5, and a 35W4. Okay, so took the knobs off and pulled the chassis out. Here's what we're looking like underneath. It's kind of interesting. The wires come out that side. There's a ground connection over here. One is a, they're both 50s, 5150s. 0.022, 0.047, 0.047. Not much there. So do I want to look at a schematic of this or do I want to just, I guess I want to do it where it'll last for them. Why not? Why not fix it up since I don't have to mess with the clock. Hopefully it's good. So I'm gonna try to get a little schematic and you know, you could just test the components by eye, like just see if this resistor is still in spec. You could just as easily do that. But I'd kind of like to find the across the line capacitor and just to make sure that we get that swapped. Yeah, I'd like to just look at the schematic just to see what we're right. So here is the schematics for it. Easy peasy, very simple line coming in. There is no across the line cap. There's a motor for the clock. switch that's actuated by the clock or you can put it on auto or on instead of just auto and then the series string for the uh for the five tubes there's an ac socket on the back so you can plug something on that be turned on by the clock because the switch is on that side of it, rectifier tube 35W4, there's no dial lamp, got a little cap here, filter cap, other filter cap, it's your kind of typical design loop antenna Trimmers for the, I guess the trimmer, I don't know, for the, what do they call that? That's called the RF adjustment, I believe, I don't know, when you align it. RF trimmer, is that correct? The 12BE6 converter, your IF transformer, it doesn't have the capacitor value. Noted, which really pisses Shingo off. He hates it. I'm He gets these with mica disease, silver mica disease, all the time, starting and then he has to figure out what that cap is because they never tell you. And it kind of needs to be an exact value. But anyway, hopefully we won't have to mess with that. to speak A 12BA6 IF amp, second IF transformer, second detector, auto volume control, now. and the first audio amp. This is like... A very simple design. They don't get too much simpler than this, with AVC at least. The AVC, I think, is all this. The AVC is this line. Okay, so I'm going to start swapping some caps. Like I said, there's no across the line caps. I don't have to worry about that and figure out if I got a clever place to put the filter caps. I think I can probably mount them on the sockets. You know, this one is going to ground and pin 7 of the rectifier. This one is going to ground And pin 6 of the output. So, you can probably mount them just directly on the sockets to replace the large filter. Okay, so I swapped everything out. I took the capacitor off, and the ground from here and here joined at the back of the capacitor. So, that was used as a jumper. So, they were using pin 2. 2 and 6 are connected on this. It's the 12AV6, and they connect the ground. And then pin five, I mean, I'm not pin five, pin three. isn't connected to anything on it and they were using it as a tie-off point for all of these grounds. So they had them connected together at that cap. So I just connected them together at the tube socket. And then that allowed me, since I had grounds everywhere, that allowed me to put one of the filter caps over here and one of the filter caps over here and get rid of several wires and the whole shebang bracket. It had 50. Microfarad 150s on it. I put 47 microfarad 200s on it. And the 150 is probably 8. Well, it says DC. Yeah, there were 50 150s. We put 47 200s. So we're good on that. These are all the wires that were extra. Don't need none of that crap. Okay, I checked all the resistors. Most of Fairly in spec. So you got like a 3.3 meg, it's 3.4, stuff like that. There are some that are pretty far off, like this 470 is 530, eh, 537. Eh, that's like, well, that's not too bad, I guess that's like 20%. The 150 is 220, that one's pretty rough, that's about 45%. So I guess we'll see how she sounds and if we got problems we'll swap some resistors. So while I've got this open I'm going to spray some contact cleaner in the volume pot and then I'm going to grab some tubes and I guess we'll test them and then we'll give it a complement of five tubes and see if she'll work. Okay so I have my out my trusty B&K precision model 747B. So the first tube that we need is a 50C5. Let's see what we got here. That's not good. So that's the short button. It's not supposed to move when you hit the short button. I wonder if that works differently on a 50 C5. Okay, let me try another one. So my understanding is the way this is supposed to work is when you hit the short button, this light will light if you have a short or the needle will move. The needle shouldn't have moved. And when you hit grid emission, you do not want the needle to do anything because you're looking for grid emission as a leaking thing. You don't want it to do that. Um, so both of these, you should see nothing. And if you see the needle swing on either, or if you see the short light light up on either, um, you got a bad tube, but it could be that certain tubes don't work that way. Yeah. See, this one's completely different. It's short. No problem. Gritty mission. No problem. And then to test it, it tests good. So that's a good tube. So let me swap the other one back in and we'll see if it does the same. what it did a second ago. if it does i will say that this tube is still very hot. i don't know if that means anything. this one has cooled off more than that one has and i just took this one out. let the filament warm up a little bit again. all right, i don't know folks you'll have to explain that to me. maybe it didn't like something about how it was in there before. i'll tell you what since i got a questionable reading and since it yes it tests good but it's you know it's lower than the other one i'm just gonna throw it away because uh there's no need to to uh i don't know it's It's probably fine, but... You saw what happened a minute ago. Better safe than sorry. I'm gonna get rid of it. I got a ton of these 50C5s. They're not that expensive. You can buy as many of them as you want for a dollar. If I got one that's doing something a little trick, I'm gonna throw it in the trash. All right, the next tube that we need to test is a 35W4. Shorts. No grid problems. Hmm, hmm. No testing either. It looks good. The filament's glowing pretty good. It must not be happy with something. See if that changed anything. There we go. That's better, right? All right, so no shorts, no grid emission issues, test strong. All right, so we got a 35W4. All right, so this is a 12AV6, which is a triode. It's got three different deals in it, and it has a short and the grid emission is doing it. So basically you don't want to even hit the test button on that because it's going to cause you all kinds of problems. So that one I'm going I'm going to trash, try another one. Candidate number two. That one ain't going to work. All right, let's try another one. So this one appears to be new old stock, Sylvania. No shorts, no grid emission problems. Ooh, that's what new old stock looks like. Oh, okay, so there actually are tubes that test really good on this. All right, let's try the second side of it. Test two, also good, okay. And finally, test three. I don't think you have to do the short and grid emission on all three of them, I don't believe. So our 12AV6, we found a good one. So it's got three, it's the triode, I guess. So it's the second detector, and it's the AVC, and it's the first audio amp. Next up, 12BA6. No shorts, no emissions, test good. Very cool. So now we're up to a 12BE6. Not good, short, grid problems. I shouldn't test it if it's got a short. So we messed with that on that other one and we removed one, put another one in and then put this one, put that other one back and it no longer had the short. Let's see if that is a thing. grid emission problems. All right, so that one is done for the world. Let's try another one. Candidate number two is a Westinghouse. Did not glow much or it's not in there very well. Well, now I've got it set up right. That's suspicious that I've got two that both have shorts. You don't, you know, you don't see a ton of them with shorts. Let me make sure I've got Okay, so I picked up a whole bunch of tubes from all over the place. Like, you know, I run across them all the time. And I just tried three 12BE6s, and they all tested with shorts in them. And then I went and I got a different stash. I've got them all together and everything, but I can just tell by the boxes. Like, for instance, this was a box. See how it's dirty? I remember where I got those. And then this is a box, which is my handwriting. And I remember where I got those. Well, the ones that were in the old-looking boxes all had shorts. Now, here's one of the ones in the regular box. No short, no grid emission, and it tests good. So, some guy might have just been saving all of his shorted tubes or something and put them all in boxes, or maybe he just had them in a big box and somebody else came along and put them in boxes. I don't know, but whatever. However, um... So I've probably got just a bunch, you know, and I'm sure everybody goes through this. I've probably got a ton of tubes that aren't really any good that people saved over the years. It was probably a common thing if you were a repair shop to take that tube that, you know, they were kind of expensive for a while. You know, if they were in today's money, $15 or something like that, maybe. I don't know. With inflation, maybe some of them were $15. Throw them in a box and just save them. I mean, maybe you'd hate to throw away something that costs $15 and you end up with a few hundred of them. And then the shop closes or something, and they end up, and somebody picks them up and goes, oh, look at all these tubes, and saves all of them, even though they're all bad. But anyway, that's our last tube that we needed. So we'll put this up. We'll populate them into the radio, and then we'll bring it up on a variac and see if the thing will actually work. All right, so I've got a BK Precision power supply that has an amp meter on it, too. The way I like bringing these up is to just watch the amp meter while you put a little power to them and see if it starts. Pegging, if it does, that means that you've got some kind of short in the radio. Now, remember, we just replaced all the caps. So, basically, unless I screwed up, there shouldn't be any shorts in it. This power supply would be better if it had two meters, but it doesn't. You have to swap back and forth. So, that's got us at 30 volts. That ammeter pulling it off. 60 volts. Okay, I hear the clock running. Usually, you'll get the radio doing something at 60 or 70 volts. I wonder if we've got a loose socket. You know, these string sets. Basically, if one... Filament is loose. The whole thing turns off. All right. Let's give it a little more. The motor gets louder. Still no amperage. The motor gets louder as you turn it up. Well, did I forget to put something in there? Did I forget a cap? Did I forget to hook something up? Because we're dead as hell. We don't have any tube glow, folks. 90 volts, you ought to have some tube glow. Just for giggles. That's 110 volts. Tubes are not glowing. So I've got an open, I don't have an open filament, but I might have an open socket somewhere. So let me turn it back down and you can check the filament string, you know, with the schematics. You can check from beginning to end and you should have a series of resistors basically that represent the filament. Okay, so there were two of them that were not making good contact in their socket. I haven't tested it yet or anything, but I tested it with a meter and got continuity between pin three and four on all of the sockets which is the filament so let's try this again shall we watching the amperage nothing the clock going we are at 70 volts damn still nothing let's try a little more let's try a little more shall we we probably don't have a shorted cap or you know from the very beginning we'd have a problem with our yeah i got nothing dead dead dead i guess we'll truck driver it Please don't electroshock me, old radio. Please don't electrocute me. We'll have to test the voltage through it with the schematic if I can't just wiggle one and get it to pop in. Yeah, I got nothing. Now, there is a switch on the clock to turn on the radio, and it's in the on position. All right, we've got to check some voltages. Okay, so our problem is we're not getting the voltage to the clock. If I check it right here at this socket, we do not have 120 volts. Should be, right now it should be 40 volts. But power comes in. It powers the motor. There's a connection off the motor through that switch. And then that should connect over. So basically, we don't have any voltage here. But the clock is running. So we've got voltage here. It's not getting through this switch. Okay, so it appears I had the switch set wrong. If it's in the middle, it looks like it's sending power to it. So let's try it again. We should have power going to the radio now. Yeah, I think I just... I think our amp meter moved slightly, didn't it? The clock is running. Yep, we're getting tube glow now. Yeah, it went a little higher than I wanted. We're at 80. Yeah, no significant draw on the amp meter. We're up to 100 volts, 110. There we go. Sir, if you're a Democrat, are you going to vote or are you going to vote? Are you going to vote or are you going to vote? Game five of the Major League Baseball World Series. We're in second. What's their first chapter book? WBT's loud and clear on 107.9 FM. News, talk, traffic, weather, sports, live and local. 107.9 FM, WBT, your city, your station. Yeah, this will probably get a lot louder. I'm probably nowhere on station. If I turn this a little more, it'll probably come in very loud. I need to put the knob on it, make it easier to turn. So this is the biggest mystery on the radio around here. Like, that's WBT 1110. I've told you this story on other ones if you watch the channel a lot. That's WBT 1110. And by the way, we're still at 110 volts. Let's turn it up to where it's actually going to be operating. I know my friend Gene, he doesn't care that there's 125 volts coming out of his wall, so he's going to plug it in. Um So WBT is one of the original Clear Channel stations, 50,000 watts. It's four miles from my house as the signal flies. Um, so it's this huge and it's nighttime right now. So it's this huge signal, right? They went off the air nine months ago, 10 months ago, and they stopped playing, uh, their programs, which was talk radio. Basically. Um, they stopped playing all their programs and they moved to the FM channel. So they moved over to 107.9 FM, which they purchased, uh, because they're, they used It used to be simulcast on a... Somewhere like 93-something or whatever, I can't remember. I don't remember. But they're this huge, they're like the AM station anywhere near here, right? So they stopped the show, they stopped the programs, but the programs are on the FM channel. So all they did was just switch the frequency. However, they started playing this Muzak on the AM frequency and left it going. So I don't have any way to tell how strong it still is, but it still comes in. Just crazy, because I'm only four miles from the tower. So they're still running it and pumping out that signal and spending whatever money that must cost. It's got to cost a lot of money to put out a 50,000-watt signal, you would think, right? And there's three huge towers four miles from here, and apparently they're going to sell that property. There's a transmitting station there, too, that's from, like, the 1940s or something, or maybe even earlier. Earlier. And that property, to be honest, it's not really super valuable. I mean, it's in an okay area, but it's not like prime real estate. It is in town, but it's not like the nicest part of town where they're building all of this really expensive stuff. They're not. They'll probably put condominiums there, but there's other areas of land there. around that that they could have bought but apparently they're going to sell that property which I don't know if they're going to sell it to another radio station or what but hopefully they will so they can save this channel but for now we get relaxing music at 50,000 watts. All right so I'm gonna put it back together and we'll see if it if it'll tune in a few stations good enough that we can send it back to them without actually aligning the thing because I kind of run into trouble when I align them sometimes so I'd rather leave it how it is and not align everything but we did get it back up and running. all right yeah so for the radio to be on you want it set where it says radio you want it in the middle and then for the automatic to be on or off you want it set going on or on or off so if i turn it to the middle it will turn the radio back but remember it's killing the power completely to the radio so it'll take it a second for the tubes to warm up i put a little glue on the logo put it back in place put some glue behind it and i got to let it dry and try to clean it up a little bit Charlotte's on the move, and so is your station. Okay, so that's up at 1,600, and 1,110 did come in at about 1,100 on the dial. So my test is always to see if we're at, if we can get WSM in. Policies on taxes and bringing down drug costs, telling a crowd. The highest priced drugs. He's seemingly confident. Leaders of Israel's next government. Lincoln Avenue. Brian Melendez is half a block away. I just heard a ton of screams. I want to head to Sean's place. 11 to 97. Okay, so there is a, so we're at what looks like $6.50. It wasn't looking good. So there is a sports station just above it that I think is at like $6.60 or something. So if we go just below this, we should be able to get WSM if this thing can, if it's a cooker. I mean, if it can just grab it from all the way from Nashville. He's going to be dead. That ain't country. It might be. The fouls are back. There was two fouls in five seconds. Sometimes you can turn it and get it to do something. Above it should be that sports channel. It's there. It's pulling it in. 101 sur les 120 députés. Sometimes you can find some channels that are playing some good rock music and stuff at night. Good for it. Well, European. That was the daughter of the South Asian woman. And maybe some questions that you have for Dr. Chudnick. What it does, more than anything, it's intensive. Thank you. And we're live here outside the Perez family home just waiting for the... And there they go! Oh, my God. Oh, my God. We're calling you here on ESPN Radio. Rays rally... That's 1600 as far as it went. Little Craig Morgan. Hey, I wonder if I say their name like that, if that helps them identify it. I wonder if the little algorithm's going, what song is that? I don't know if I can. And then it hears me go, Craig Morgan. And it goes, oh, that's right. It's a Craig Morgan song. Yeah, let's go ahead and give him a copyright strike. Well, he was saying he wanted a loud radio. It is loud. It just, there's nothing out there really on AM right now. Maybe during the day, Today there's more stuff. Probably not. All right, folks, so there you go. I think we got it working. I think he'll be happy with that. He probably just wanted to see the thing work again. I don't know. But cool little radio. If he didn't want it, I'd stick it right up there on my shelf. I'd put it with the others. So I hope you enjoyed the video. Leave your comments below, and we will see you on the next one. Oh, the cleaning it up. He doesn't like We've known him a long time. He's not the type that cleans anything up, so he thinks this looks He'll call me and say he's got, he found something. It looks brand new. blah, blah, blah. He got it for $5 if I'm interested in it. And you know, he won't even be trying to make any money. And he thinks stuff like this looks brand new. So he'll be completely happy with that. I fixed the logo. He may have noticed that. I don't know. Yeah. We will see you on the next video. Have a good one.