So I got this old WW2 radio from an old lady. Her husband, who passed away recently, was collecting small radios and now she finaly wanted to get rid of some of the collections of hin. I was allowed to chose one of the radios from the shelve.
Disclaimer
As this is a german radio from the time of the second world war there are symbols like the swastika or the Reichsadler all over that thing. Please keep in mind that I am just interested in the technical aspects of the radio and the history that this thing has witnessed.
All shown symbols are for documentational purposes only and dont represent my personal feelings, attitude or thoughts in this regard.There were many interesting radios on that shelve, like Philips Philetta, some nice Grundig or Blaupunkts... But one very inconspicious one, the little black box, second row, second from the left, catched my attention.
(All pictures enlarge when clicked on)
That one is a DKE38, or a "Deutscher Kleinempfänger 1938", made by the Nazi Regime under Hitler as a very cheap alternative to the rather pricey "Volksempfänger" VE301 so that the propaganda could even reach the poorest souls out there. It cost 35 Reichsmark (compared to the 75 Reichsmark for the Volksempfänger) and was reduced to the absolute bare minimum to make something simmilar to a radio. It was considerably smaller, lighter, cheaper and.... well, crappyer than his bigger brother.
(The only(?) not enlargeable picture... source:
http://www.normei-weinheim.de/DKE38NM/DKE38_V1.html )
Sadly I forgot to take some nice "before" pics, so here you have two pictures the lady sent me when I askef her for that radio.
Front view. please note the crack on the bottom left of the bakelite case (there is another one, not visible, in the back) and the moldy cloth. that was once nearly white and not stiff as cardboard.
The rear view shows the missing backpanel (common and unobtainium), a defective power switch (also common and unobtainium) and a broken off heater series resistor (maybe repairable).
Also: Missing Rectifier Tube (common but still more or less obtainable), a cracked speaker mount on the top right, dirt, grime and moisture residue on the chassis as well as some very bad bodged parts in the region of the mains capacitors.
Since the cables are insulated by cotton dipped in wax (?), which is absolutely horribly brittle, I decided to replace ALL wires, as far as possible. So I disassembled the radio as good as possible, taking care to not destroy anything that can't be replaced in the process. (Work in Progress picture, again, I missed out with "before" pictures...)
This area around the coils I will try to keep the original wiring, as the wires coming from the coils are very thin and I am afraid to break them. Since the posts are pretty solid the shouldn't move and cause troubles. BNut it needs a good cleaning for sure.
Another view of the coil assembly
So, after some hours of disassembling stuff the chassis was empty and all parts were more or less free from old crumbly cables:
These are parts that are going straight to the trash. please note the funny angle the pins of the mains plug have. I'm sure that is not supposed to be like that.
These I will try to refill with new caps to keep the original style. The brown paper capacitor wasn't original so I decided to drop that one and stuff two caps in the other red-ish mains capacitor, to build kind of a double cap. Also not very original, but in my oppinion better than having five different caps bodged in there, as it was before.
So I started removing the old stuff from the capacitors shells, cleaning the shells and finding new suitable caps.
And this is the result. (the mentioned "double cap" isn't in the picture) Most of the writing and marking is intact.
I would have prefered to use black hotglue to seal those new caps in there, sadly I didn't have any. So now those tar filled caps converted to "wax" filled varieties, which is accurate for the time.
After that I started polishing the contacts from the tube sockets which I had removed before.
Looks like a new socket, doesn't it? Also, the chassis itself got washed in the dishwasher, as well as the case.
Nice detail where you see that the radio was built right in war times: the precious brass was short, so they switched over to steel for the contacts - here they ran out of brass contacts for the fuse I guess.
I started reassembling the thing, which isn't realy easy as those steel tabs tend to break very fast, as you can see on the right side where one of the pins already broke off while disassembling.
You can also clearly see that this radio was made by Telefunken
The filter choke got cleaned,...
... and got a bit of new paint on the metal parts.
The variable capacitors got refitted....
... as well as the coils.
So this is where I am right now.
The next steps will be:
- Finding a suitable replacement for the tube style resistors (any ideas are very appreciated!)
- rebuilding the circuit
- modifying the circuit while doing that to incorporate some neccessary fixes (more on that later)
- polish the case and repair the cracks
- glue in a new loudspeaker cloth
- find a way to replace the broken anti hum pot and the busted power switch as well as the back panel
Hope you enjoyed it so far
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