Guild Spice Chest Radio
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This is an early Spice Chest radio with solid doors. On
this radio the joints had separated in places, perhaps because the solid wood panels
warp a little with age, so the first job was to glue it back together. Clean all the excess
glue off with a wet cloth after clamping, then leave it clamped overnight to get good,
strong joints. After that the cabinet was cleaned and lightly rubbed down with steel wool. Then any scratches were filled and colored and it was given a few coats of clear lacquer. Finally, it was carefully rubbed down with fine steel wool and then a cloth, which removes the 'sprayed' look and gives a nice finish. |
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The aluminum chassis cleaned up very nicely. Only problems were to properly secure the speaker and the IF transformer cans. The speaker is attached to a bracket with sheet metal screws, which come loose. These were replaced with screws, nuts and locking washers. | ||
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| The IF transformers are secured to the chassis with with clips which can be difficult to get fitted properly. The clips should fit nice and snug in the cut-outs in the cans. If you need to you can remove the clip from under the chassis to re-bend it to shape. | |||
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| The chassis is simple. Paper and electrolytic capacitors were replaced, and also a couple of resistors which were high in value. The 12AV6 was replaced, and an ac fuse and new power cord fitted. The tuning capacitor was shorting in one position, this was fixed by carefully bending the plates. | |||
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Later models have some changes:
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The audio input socket (seen in the photo of a transformer can above) is wired via the tone
control on the front panel. When the
tone control is moved to either extreme position it switches between radio and external
audio, but it is not marked as such, so it is easy to turn the tone control too
far and think that the radio has stopped working. I wire this out, so that the radio
is always selected. The ferrite rod antenna is mounted on a length of wood dowel near the back of the chassis. On one radio I found that the signal level changed when it was tapped. The original solder joints on the antenna rod were dry, re-soldering solved the problem. Between the detector and output tubes is what looks like a square ceramic capacitor with several leads, marked CRL PC-70. This is a "printed electronic circuit" or PEC made by Centralab. It contains the 12AV6 plate resistor, the audio filter capacitors, and the 50C5 coupling capacitor and grid resistor. At the time I did not know what the internal component values should be, and I thought the plate resistor value was high at 515k. So I replace the whole lot with descrete components, using 270k for the plate resistor and 560k for the 50C5 grid resistor. I now know that 500k is the nominal value of both resistors in the unit. |
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