I bought some vintage radios with the idea of repairing them and doing them up, amongst them was a shabby very old looking,The Fisk model R63 the insides look to be in very good condition with just a light coating of dust the case is wood covered with crocodile skin patterned canvas that's hanging off in places S/N G-53194. There is another number stamped into the chassis, C0049688. I'm wondering how collectable this model is before I start fiddling with it and potentially stuff it up?

What valves are in it 63 is 1937 Battery type.

Hi Marc, I think these are the valve numbers 1A7GT,1P5GT,1Q5GT,1H5GT.

Most radios made in the 1930s are highly desirable. They were the first of the 'domesticated' radios, that being radios that looked more like a piece of furniture and not something that looked more at home in a science laboratory.

Many radios made in the 1930s had a better tone quality than 1940s-onwards. The story is that customers favouored a more mellow tone during the 1940s and this seemed to come at a price - less audio bandwidth.

I thought it may have been out of the ordinary it just had that feel about it, I can see it has a rola speaker in it and that's quality.

Yeh! All good thats what the 63 in the AORSM's has in it .

The leatherette can be replaced with "Tolex" have a look at what EVATCO has, for comparison.

Few people collect battery sets due to the cost of batteries & inconvenience of getting them. However, I have repaired a few and have a Peter Pan Adventurer sitting in the kitchen waiting for it's owner to come and retrieve it. I made a battery pack up for it.

You can make & Aquire locally power supplies to run it ..Refer Airzone in Silicon Chip a while back it was similar.

The wiring diagram shows an AC power supply for it. which just plugs in (if you can get the plug).

Filaments for that are 1.4V (input 1.5V) Battery 10 x 9V el cheepo. Don't fire it up with old caps & check the speaker transformer first.

It may only need the paper caps & electrolytics replaced and a tidy up?

Marc

It doesn't have a Rola speaker in it I had it confused with another radio I have!Sorry about that chief LOL A few questions. Do you happen to remember the edition of silicon chip with the air-zone power supply?Are paper oil capacitors replaced with electolytics? I have 630 ohms across the terminals going to the speaker transformer,Does that sound OK? Does MFD stand for micro-farad or milli-farad?

MFD = μF = microfarad.

Millifarads are seldom used as a value because this unit is too large for most condensers.

August 2010 for Airzone.

There are wax paper caps, and oil filled caps which are both about as reliable as each other ..... bin.

There are wet electrolytics that have a big nut on the end of them (doubt in that) the rest will have a polarity marked on them and a value like 20 mfd working volts (WV) Some electrolytics are also in small tall chassis mounted cans.

If you are not sure photgraph it. My email is not hidden (i think) or send to Brad.

Marc

My email is not hiiden (i think)

Yes it is. They are all hidden by default. You have to go to your profile and manually "unhide" if you wish to.

Just a word regarding my e-mail - I am having serious software issues with my mail server at the moment. If you'd like any material posted here (hosted by this site) please e-mail it to my dusty old webmail account, chatbotbigpond.com, and I will do the rest.

As GTC mentioned, all member e-mail addresses are hidden from view by default for privacy reasons though members who wish to be contactable may visit their profile page and make their address visible. As a measure against spamming, even when a member unhides their address it will only be visible to site members who are logged in.

please e-mail it to my dusty old webmail account

Brad, may I suggest that you update your profile's email address to the temporary account (assuming that you haven't aliased it in some manner already).

I think Ive bitten off more than I can chew with these radios so if anyone wants them except for the philips168,they can pick them up or whatever from XXX XXXX st Geraldton .There is the Fisk R63, Crown SPH-100, its a germanium transistor portable radio & phono there is another one with 8 valves,GM5,GM5,6N,6GW8,6BD7,6BD7,& two other valves with no writing at all.This one has no cabinet.I'm just going to stick with one instead of getting confused working on 3 at a time LOL My emails not hidden.

Updated. Unfortunately there's no way to alias/redirect e-mail. The problem is on the mail server itself. I can send mail out and send/receive from and two all hosted e-mail accounts but nothing can arrive from elsewhere on the Net.

Over Easter I am going to do a bit of an overhaul, install the current version of the software and then go through the legthy task of re-adding my accounts. Hopefully that will get things going again.

Along with the failure of the web server a month or so ago, this is just one of the things a do-it-yourselfer has to contend with. Well, it happens in larger installations too, though these are generally owned by entities with the budgets to run failover server clusters.

Interesting that your server is playing up I just managed to have a "time out" while browsing RS components?

I don't see an issue with projects, you just have to attack them in sequence. The bench here last week was chaos with three bits of test gear and a radio, then a CRO in various stages of repair, painting or waiting parts.

It's now more organised with 2 radio's one of which has been hacked (horror). A Kriesler 11/50 that came in today and had only open R16's (fatigue) & now needs burn testing ( while I expore the hack, or sort out the fish tank that also came with the Kriesler).

Excited by all of that I spent the afternoon driving the lawn tractor around 3 acres of lawn.

If you feel the desire to keep the units, pick through them slowly & ask questions.

Marc