TOM WILLS PRODUCTIONS: The Big Radio

Philco 42-380 (1941)

Imagine the history that spoke from this radio.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats. World War II. People gathered round the radio, anxious to hear what was happening in the big world.

Big radio, big world.

Tubes generating enough heat to warm the room.
Shortwave to listen in on London, Berlin and Tokyo. Havana, too.
A police band to monitor goings on in town.
AM radio to dance to.

Shortly after arrival. Busted face, broken feet, cracked faceplate.

My big radio, a Philco 42-380, is 72 years old. It sold for $75 in 1941.
It arrived in my driveway in the back of a pickup truck, from my friends Bob and Cindy Michael, who live at the very top of Ohio in Burghill.
They must have teriffic radio reception up and out there.
I would visit their secluded house with my art, and my dog, and we'd shoot the breeze.
In the small hallway between almost every room in the place sat the Philco, which I admired.
Bob said it worked and we plugged it in a couple of times.
It kind of bleeped and farted and hummed.
Oh well.
It had been there a long, long time.

Decades of dust.

This summer I had an occasion to deliver another picture up and out there, and we plugged in the Philco again. The knobs were missing and the faceplate was broken. There were just a few nicks in the wood -- otherwise it was perfect.
They said that I could have it if I repaired and cleaned a big 1970s Realistic receiver that Bob delivered in his truck, with the Philco.
There's not much space left in my man cave full of stuff, but I found a corner for "Phil."
Truthfully the more crap I cram down here, the less visits from upstairs.

Tubes and tuning mechanism after an initial cleaning.

And here's another truth: I tore down and cleaned up the big radio first, and Bob's receiver afterward.
And I will also testify that it was a filthy beast. Seventy-two years of you-name-it lived in there, and one live cricket. I vacuumed and brushed and sprayed and scrubbed the hell out of it, and was still finding crud up to the day I reassembled everything.
Each tube got a shining.
The paper speaker, very fragile, tore twice. My fault. I repaired it and it works fine.

Heard 'round the world.

The restoration of 42-380 was approached as an art project.
Sure hoped it worked, but really wanted it to look pretty.
So, I made new radio knobs out of unfinished cabinet knobs, drilling holes in the back just big enough to slide onto the tuner spindles.

Fabricating the faceplate.

I used craft paint and a thin brush to touch up nicks in the wood.
Some of the faceplate was salvageable, and some of it got reconstructed with layers of cardboard, glue and paint. It was made of Bakelite, an early plastic that had warped and cracked.

Always plenty of newspaper here for painting projects.

Almost-finished faceplate, except for brown paint on rebuilt bottom edges.

But mostly it's wood, steel and glass. And now it is beautiful.

It was an art project!

Although I was able to get all eight of the big vacuum tubes to glow, three of them are rather dim and I will replace them. There seem to be plenty available online but they are expensive.
The light bulbs inside are missing but I can order those, too.

New feet (also cabinet knobs), new cloth grille.

Underneath the tuner are more worrisome problems: Paper capacitors resembling firecrackers, which hold electrical charge (there's a wire running through them) and electrolytic capacitors resembling fat crayons. They're a bit soggy and waxy, and I'm not so sure how much juice they can hold. I turn the radio on and off with a power strip and don't dare leave it plugged in.

"Phil."

There's a big moveable antenna in the back of the cabinet but it's nearly at floor level in my basement, so odds of its 72-year-old guts getting a strong signal are not great.
I'll get the tubes this winter and hook it up to an external antenna and see what happens.