Dan's page of tubes and classic electronics

History: I ended up buying a lot of stuff (way more than I should have I suppose) from a local repair shop that had been closed for many many years. I'm the type that likes to tinker with things so I passed up a lot of the complete plain plastic AA5 sets in favor of more unique project sets. In the end I ended up with some extra cases and chasses, both with the intent of building working sets out of some of them, or just for trading or future projects and parts. Of course in the process, I ended up piecing together sets that should have never been! This is just a few examples, I'm hopefully going to keep this limited to my own stuff, but you never know! Please note that no nice radios were harmed in the making of this page.

(what happens when you mix a detrola and a Packard Bell)

Confused by the name? This set is a Packard Bell 5D chassis in a Detrola wood table top case. Kinda has a southern ring to it, doesn't it? Anyway, in my "junk parts collecting" I noticed many sets had this same basic layout, speaker on the left, dial with two knobs below on the right. This chassis went right in the case with two simple mods, a larger cardboard dial scale, and a piece of sheet metal to adapt between the different mounting holes. In fact, despite the difference in the size of the dial face, I used the origional Packard Bell dial, I just scanned it at work, stretched it left to right, and printed it out! If anyone knows what model of Detrola this came from, please let me know. No, I didn't paint it, it came that way. The funny white above the dial/speaker is a combination of the remains of a sticker, and the glare from the camera flash :)

(My Philco is now a General)
General Philco? A military Philco? What? No! Don't throw away that old worn out Philco radio, upgrade it to the more modern and stylish General Electric radio reciever technology! As hard as I tried, I wasn't able to pass up this old Philco case. Unfortunatly My picture doesn't show it, but the back looks just like the front, only minus the cutout for the dial and knobs. The chassis slides in from the bottom and is held in with 4 screws in the corners. It took me a while before it dawned on me that the GE radio, shown sitting on top of it, has the same spacing between the knobs. I got that GE at a thrift store for $3, it was complete and it even worked, though it was getting to where there was a fair amount of hum. Unfortunatly the plastic grill is cracked (can't be seen in the photo), there are lots of chips and a big crack along the bottom, like something fell on it. I figured $3 was a good price for the 5 vacuum tubes, and got it anyway. Aparently it was, there's only one left in it now :) I found the maroon version that was missing the tuning knob, so was robbed too. This set has no real chassis, just a PCB that's parallel to the radio face, with the tuner and volume control mounted to it. The next step is to recap the GE, and get it running again, and to cut an L shaped piece of metal to mount the chassis and to attach to the bottom of the Philco case. I guess I'll need to mount the speaker that way to, it's just attached to the plastic on the GE. Hopefully knobs won't be tough to figure out, I have this bad fealing that the shafts will be too long or short for the origional style knobs (the GE volume control has a much longer shaft than the tuning cap).

Things to look for in the future:

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