The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Electrical Bay 1965 radio repair.

Hey ya'll..

I've got a run of the mill factory AM radio in my '65 C10. It's solid state, of course, with no station presets...just off & on..tone and tuning. It's a bit weak sounding and doesn't bring in the stations like it should. I'm not really an electronics repairman, but I know that the electrolytic caps will need to be replaced from just age/drying out and there's a good chance that that alone will probably get the radio in a much better shape. That's pretty easy to do...just replace with the same value and keeping the polarity right.
I am competent solderer. heh

After all that, my question is;

Other than replacing caps and checking resistor values, is there anything else I need to check or replace in this 45 year old radio? Is there some weirdness that I don't know about? heh..

By the way, I will put the tip on all existing solder joints to "refresh" them.

Thanks for reading,

"rr"

This is just my experience with my 1957 Chevy pickup radio. Mine is a tube radio, so I replaced the electrolytics, tubes, vibrator (solid state), cleaned it up, etc. It worked OK, but I was disappointed with number of stations it pulled in, and most of the AM stations around here I didn't care for. Thinking that maybe I didn't do a good job on the rebuild, I bought a professionally rebuilt one. It didn't work any better than my rebuild. I then bought a Custom Sound reproduction (gets FM - where the oldies stations are - and has hookups for stereo speakers and CD changer). It works great, looks almost original, no tubes to be maintained, and was cheaper than than the professional rebuild. They also come up on eBay at times. I kept my original radios, but am happier with the reproduction. Some prefer the original, which is good, but I thought I would let you know about my experience and consider it in your planning.

Could also be your antenna lead wire, or speaker as well. AM can sound great.
A lot of it depends both on the stations, and what they are broadcasting. Where I live, we have a local world music station, that always sounds muddy. Driving around, I've noticed that most stations that are playing "newer" music sound muddy on my AM radio. We also get an oldies station (KIXI), which sounds just great, much clearer. I also find the same thing when I play music though the aux input, big band and Perry Como sound great, newer stuff not so great.

If you post your question in the Radio Bench sub forum, you might get some additional help.

Yeah, it seems quiet in there.


Wow Fred, 4500 posts!!!!!!!

Thanks for the replies ya'll. I though I'd seen a radio section in the forums before. I didn't take the time to look all the way through..I apologize for that. Heck, I even posted this in the "60 -'66" area and just babbled on about capacitors. Anyway..I'll know for next time.

I considered getting a newer after market radio, but I decided to keep the original style in there just for the time warp I can go into sometimes when driving my old truck down a country road and hearing an old Webb Pierce shuffle on WSM when the skip comes in at night.heh

A lot of the old AM stations still run old equipment..heck, I've been on AM transmitter sites where they have 40-50 year old equipment in there that's still in operation. A good engineer can go in there and tweak the processing stuff to get a better sound..but I've found that the mindset is..if it ain't broke..don't fix it...so goes life.

I'm pretty sure i can get my old radio back up to snuff. I would like to find a service manual/ schematic that has the alignment procedures in it though. I do have a new antenna that grounded well so, that's not the problem. I'll just pry the radio open and start replacing the usual suspects.

For the most part,compared to really old radios, the tuner sensitivity and selectivity are probably much better. With my semi educated guessing, the car companies probably didn't want to make a radio(s) with very sophisticated circuits in them to keep the profits higher.

..and I just noticed the radio forum section...my gosh..I'm blind..heh

The Rdaio Forum is kind of hidden up at the top of the Electrical Forum. I would imagine it gets missed a lot.

I like the old equipment myself although the new radios should be able to pull in a lot more. If I were a designer from the tube era, I would be pretty proud of the accomplishments of the time.

And that's exactly what I did! heh...My eyes caught the subject matter of the posts and I flew right over the radio section link!

I bet they would be proud..miniaturization and the transistor for starters..heck. I'm still amazed at surface mount technology..that stuff is too small for me to fool with!