I was going to part it out. The two Radiola interstage transformers were good.

The "restorer" could not get the knobs off, so he could not get the chassis out of the cabinet. "No sweat"' he thought. I'll just slather poly on everything - the dials, knobs and bezels included. But first, since I can't get the cabinet stripped of the old finish properly, I'll just scrape it with a knife(?).

Well, when he got done, it looked pretty good from around 10 feet away. Sue said that she liked it. So it was diverted towards 2 or 3 days of restoration which was mostly figuring out how to get the poly off of everything.

The former owner managed to remove most of the character of the wood by scraping the front panel. So much so that the bezels were raised by a little lip where the scraper could not reach. So I added a little bit of grain and a knot or two prior to refinishing.

Completed 5-tube TRF - 4 each 199 and one UX 120 for audio output. I still need to find the paper instruction label for the underside of the lid.

Craig's List item. Before and after.
Yeah, the radio chassis had a few issues, but, so did the cabinet.

Fortunately, in the process of replacing the front veneer with a single sheet of Mahogany, the seller did not get the damaged front panel firmly glued to the arch. Unfortunately, the original trim was lost.

Since the back side of the panel was also damaged, I found it was easier to just make a new panel. The picture above shows the original front after it was reglued and cleaned up. At one point I was going to re-veneer but other damage caused me to reconsider. Much of the grill area had been "patched" with a filler similar to Bondo or some sort of wood filler.

The geometry of the arch trim is a somewhat more  difficult than most people would think. Not impossible, but, just try to calculate the inner curve (at a tangent to the outer curve).

The rest was router work and adding the Zebrawood veneer.

IF the most important consideration regarding the restoration of a chassis is the amount of rust, then this one was not so bad. Unfortunately the power transformer had been replaced and was missing it's cover. Another interesting deficiency was discovered in the tuning cap. There was just enough oxidized metal deposited on the insulators to cause the volume control circuit not to work.

This volume control is much better than a simple rheostat placed on the antenna input but also more complicated. If you get a chance, it can be seen here:

http://www.nostalgiaair.org/Resources/480/M0001480.htm

Aah, Spring, fresh flowers and old radios!

P.S. No, I didn't pay $100 for it.

Russ