Philco 70 project begins

Well, I decided to get into restoring old radios, and I've now hit the big time. I just purchased a Philco 70 cathedral from Mike T., and it's going to need a LOT of work.

There's a lot of water damage to the veneer on the front, and that missing piece of veneer on the scrollwork, but that's the least of it...




So let's tally up what we've got. The front is damaged but probably needs all new veneer. The arch is completely shot, needs to be replaced, along with new veneer. Back arch support is missing, needs to be purchased or fabricated. And the chassis is very rusty. You'll see pics of this later, but trust me. The variable capacitor has rust on every plate. The rubber grommets are all shot. This thing needs to be torn down & rebuilt. But the tubes look good :-) And for the most part, it is complete - one knob looks home-made, but I'm not sure if that's because that's what it is, or if it somehow got damaged.

So I bought this thing on 2/21/06, and so far I've managed to dismantle most of the cabinet. I need to get the arch separated from the front, which I'm told can be done with an iron on a wet towel, to generate steam.

It took me a while to figure out how to replace the arch. I finally discovered that there is such a thing as flexible plywood. Most of the time you buy plywood because you want it to be rigid, so I guess this is somewhat unusual. But finding a piece locally looked like it was going to be difficult, so I found that Van Dykes Restorers has the stuff in small sizes, and it was pretty reasonable. So I purchased a 1'x4' piece, and it arrived on 3/8/06. It looks like it will do the job. I had hoped that the plain poplar wood might be a decent replacement for the mahogany veneer that was original on this radio, but it looks almost like balsa - very lightweight and rough.

So now I have to find some veneer. The original plan was a single piece to cover the entire arch. That might be difficult, because on this radio, the grain runs from front to back, while most narrow veneer is cut in such a way that the grain runs the long way. Since I need a piece 4' long, this won't work, unless I get a 4'x8' sheet, which is really expensive.

I was looking at the radio though, and it looks like it was put together with 3 separate pieces of veneer - one on each side, and one over the top of the arch. So I suppose that if I do it that way, it will still be "original", though I'm still somewhat concerned about my ability to hide the seam.