Today’s Run:  50 min lifting at the “Y”

My husband and I have been working on restoring a 1941 Silvertone Consul radio (model 7048 if you want to Google it).  We have been replacing capacitors and resistors and we completed that part of the restoration.  The next thing to tackle was the speaker itself.

The speaker was quite frankly, a mess.  The cone was cracked and torn.  The coil had no “umph” …it needed help.  The first thing we did was look up how to re-come a speaker.  It is not as easy as one would think.  What we did find is people who want to sell you brand new (read:  expensive) speakers that will fit antique radios.  We will keep that in mind.

Finally, my husband ran across a site that gave an answer that was almost too easy to believe (and we still are not sure if we believe it or not).  Thin down Elmer’s Glue and take tissue paper.  Simply glue the tissue paper over the cracks of the cone!  Easy!!!  You can see from the photo how much gluing we had to do.

The next thing regarding the speaker we found not to be ship shape was the coil.  It had a break in the wire.  Bad.  So, we “borrowed” (a different story all together) a spool of wire from an auto repair shop and today counted rolls of wire while we undid the broken wire and then rewound the wire with the spool we “borrowed” the same amount of times.  Complicated.

We reassemble the speaker and put in the new tubes and connected the entire thing to an isolation transformer and a serial light bulb.  These are two items that are supposed to protect your radio as you send current through it (they are supposed to keep you from frying the guts out of the radio while you are turning it on for the first couple of times).

Did it work!?!  Alas, no.  We heard some static from the speaker!!!  So, our efforts there may have been a success but we still have work to do.  Back to the drawing board I believe is how the saying goes…