Now look at this fine mess I've gotten myself into...

Well, things seem to only go from bad to worse with the Philco 70. Here's what the front panel looks like now:



The last time I posted, I showed how the previously nice & flat panel had warped badly. I wet it down and clamped it. That helped, but not enough. So I did it again. This time it not only stayed warped, but as it dried, the various layers dried at different rates. This caused the front part of the panel to crack and split. I think it's pretty well shot now.

So I figure I have two choices. Buy a whole new repro cabinet (or junker cabinet that's in better shape than mine), or figure out how to make one myself. Buying one is expensive, and I'm still not ready to give up.

Even so, I'm not sure how I'm going to do this. It doesn't look like it would be that hard - just trace the pattern onto a new piece of wood, cut it out with a scrollsaw or something similar, and put some veneer over it. Of course things always seem easy until you've actually tried to do it.

I guess we'll just have to see what I can do.

In the meantime, I've got two other smaller projects I'm trying to work on. First is a battery eliminator for my Silvertone farm radio. I've got almost all of the parts together for that - I'm just waiting on one more order to arrive. The other is an AM transmitter. As much as I like AM radio, there really isn't much there I want to listen to. So if I build my own transmitter then I can listen to the stuff I like to listen to. And best of all, there won't be any commercials :-)

I've got most of the parts for this one, but I am waiting on a few more items. I'm planning to use a slightly modified version of Syl's 6BM8 design. The mods came from tubbytwo, who used a voltage doubler in the power supply circuit. The idea being that since the tube can handle a lot more than the 160v in the original design, we can get better performance with little additional work or cost. We shall see how that goes.

Anyhow, the shell of this project began life as a Granco UHF tuner. I will be gutting it soon, and will hopefully get this project going as soon as more of the parts arrive. Originally, I bought an Astatic TV signal booster for this purpose, but once it arrived, I realized that the transformer did not have the high voltage secondary winding that I needed for this project. I suppose I could have made it work using the high-voltage circuit that it already had, but similar to an All-American-Five design, it has a hot chassis. I really don't want anything with a hot chassis around my house. Not with a very curious 2-year-old wandering around. For a few bucks more I got the Granco, and now I'm good to go.

So that's where I'm at. I have had almost no time recently to work on this stuff - just a few minutes here and there. Hopefully this will change soon (haven't I said this before?).