Christmas break has arrived and its time to start a new project. Sometime in the 1970's I bought my dad a Crosley 5-50 thinking he would enjoy getting it working, but it was one of the projects that he never got around to. It's been floating around my house since he died, and I finally decided it was time to have a go at it. It is the oldest thing I've attempted so far, but my success with the Electrola has emboldened me.
The case was pretty dirty and badly scratched:
I suspect that the switch is not original. It is not really very carefully installed, and it does not appear on pictures of other 5-50's I've found.
I decided to see what kind of job I could do of keeping the old finish using Gojo followed by Howard's. I used the darkest Howard's I could find on the dark portions, and Howard's mahogany on the rest.
It's not perfect, you can still see some of the scratches, but its way better ... good enough to be tolerable, and it saves the character of the original finish. I think I will try to enhance the gilding in the gooves with Rub 'n Buff. Then polish up the brass, give it (the brass) a coat of laquer, and re-install it.
Inside, the chassis looks pretty good.
I love the looks of those hand-wired rf transformers.
The capacitors all hold charge. One of the audio interstage transformers has an open primary, and the tickler coil is also open. These two coils are in series between B+ and the plate of the detector. I suspect that perhaps the detector's filament failed and fell into the plate, burning out both coils.
The good news is that there is a replacement available for the interstage transformer that will just slide onto the core of the original Crosley transformer. Here is the disassembled burned out transformer:
and the new coil on the core ready to be re-assembled into the case:
Removing the tickler, it looks like this:
When I unwound it, the wire fell into three separate pieces. Here it is re-wound:
It came with 5 01A's all of which test OK. The schematic shows a
112 or 171 as the final audio amplifier, but I suspect that the 01A it came with will at least have enough oomph to drive a pair of 2000 ohm headphones. Then when I win the lottery I can buy a 112 or 171. If I am reading the schematic correctly, I can jumper it so that it derives bias from A- and only need to cobble together A and B supplies, which will be tomorrow's task.