This beautifully preserved RCA K-60 radio came to me after a Golden Retriever puppy got a little too up close and personal.
Otherwise, it’s been beautifully refinished in the past, and was fully overhauled in the late ’90s according to a stamp on the rear of the chassis and the replacement speaker.
Replacement grille cloth is somewhat hard to find these days, but the pattern was almost a perfect match. It’s much cleaner, too! The speaker must have failed at one point, because it had been replaced. I’d have picked a different substitute driver myself, but this one seemed to work well enough.
On the rear, the output transformer and speaker lead connections were relocated to the basket.
Unfortunately, during transport, the field coil (which had been retained but relocated) wasn’t securely mounted and ripped from its mounting point, damaging the speaker voice coil leads in the process.
I carefully peeled back the paper and soldered new, stronger leads; then reinforced the structure with Gorilla tape. The new coil checks out – about 1K Ohms resistance, and 2.3 Henry of inductance. That’s a lot! Any further back of a break would have been much more complicated to successfully fix.
Before this repair, the field coil was just hanging from a peg with exposed metal clips into the coil – a major shock hazard, with several hundred volts present on an externally exposed, uncovered piece of metal!
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And, all set!
After a short power-up to make sure the field coil repair was sound, she’s ready to go home! Hopefully the puppy has learned a few lessons about the proper handling of antiques in the past few weeks so we can avoid a repeat performance.
RETROVOLTAGE 