Tube Time

Recently I completed restoring a Philco 48-225 AM tube radio. This radio was produced by Philco in 1948, and it was one of the first radio models to have a plastic (polystyrene) case instead of a bakelite case.

When I received the radio, the case was pretty scratched and banged up, and there was a big crack on the left side. Inside was a lot of dust and bits of dried leaves. Most of the tubes were missing, and the ones that came with it were the wrong type.

The case cleaned up nicely after a lot of wet sanding with fine-grit sandpaper and polishing with Novus 1, 2, and 3. The gold paint on the speaker grill was flaking off, but I decided to leave it alone. I saw a photo of the same model radio on eBay and someone had ruined the grill by trying to polish it–the gold paint is a very thin layer and it came off in patches.

Using superglue I fixed the crack and sanded it so that it’s barely visible. I hear you can also use a solvent-type glue, but I didn’t have any. The superglue repair is probably fragile so I will have to be gentle.

Turning the radio around, you can see the “All-American Five” tube complement. They are the 7A8 converter, the 14A7 IF amplifier, the 14B6 2nd detector/1st audio AVC, the 50L6GT audio output amplifier, and the 35Z5GT rectifier. All the tubes except for the 35Z5GT are of the Loctal variety. Unfortunately the back cover of the radio is missing.

Here is the underside of the chassis before I restored it. You can see how the paper capacitors are coming apart due to age. These radios were designed to be very low cost and were not supposed to last a very long time. The sectional electrolytic capacitor (the long pale tube on the upper right) in particular did not work at all because the electrolyte had seeped out completely.

I ended up replacing most of the capacitors. For this restoration I pushed the guts out of each capacitor and slipped the new capacitor inside the old one, sealing the ends with wax. This keeps the underside looking authentic.

Notice that there is no power transformer inside this radio. This radio operates directly off the AC line. The filaments for all 5 tubes are wired in series and the voltage ratings add up to the line voltage. The chassis itself is not grounded and it is actually part of the antenna circuit. There is a 150K resistor connecting it to one side of the AC line. The plug is not polarized so it’s quite easy to shock yourself on any exposed metal. It’s not a good idea to plug it straight into a wall socket because of this. If you try to add a 3 conductor line cord with the ground prong connected to the chassis, this will short out the radio’s antenna and the radio won’t work.

The solution is to use an isolation transformer. I have one connected to a Variac that I use to adjust the line voltage. When I first powered up the radio, I ramped the voltage up slowly to make sure there were no problems along the way. I also measured the line voltage and set it to 115V instead of 120V. AC line voltage was a little lower back in 1948. The difference doesn’t sound like much but running at the higher voltage would apply 6.6V to a tube filament rated at 6.3V. This is enough to reduce the life of the tube.

With the radio plugged in to the isolation transformer, the radio “floats” relative to the AC line, and it’s safer to touch exposed metal. It’s still a high voltage circuit so the one-hand rule applies. When the radio is isolated like this, it’s also safe to connect it to pieces of test equipment, such as an oscilloscope. The oscilloscope probe ground actually connects to the ground pin on the oscilloscope’s line cord, so if I had tried to test the radio when it was plugged straight in, I could have caused a short circuit that would have melted my scope probe.

It sounds pretty good now and it adds a vintage touch to the living room decor.

OK, it’s been a while since I’ve posted–a long summer involving friends, BBQs, weddings, hiking, and other social activities. Now that the “cold dark California winter” is setting in, I’m spending more time on projects. Here’s a peek at the latest one.

My messy workbench:

What’s this? It looks like the beginning of a wiring harness.

Can anyone guess what this is?

One of my CRT clocks has a small joystick on the front which is used to set the time. I built it a while ago using an idler wheel from an old VCR.

Well, the other day I found another idler wheel from the same VCR, and I decided to share the construction technique so that you can make one too. It’s pretty simple and takes an hour or two. You will need a VCR idler wheel that looks like the one in the picture below, four microswitches (you can scavenge these from an old computer mouse), a spring, and a piece of sheet steel to mount the whole arrangement on. The sheet metal must be steel for reasons I will discuss later.

First, take apart the idler wheel by gripping the top washer with a pair of vise-grips, taking care not too dent it too much. Grab the metal shaft with another pair of pliers and pull the assembly apart. Slide off the screw thread and the metal washer, and take the top washer (which has a convex side and a flat side), and slide it back on to the metal shaft about halfway.

Drill a hole in the sheet metal, and make the hole somewhat larger than the shaft. For my joystick I used a 3/32″ diameter drill. Insert the metal shaft into the hole so that the convex part of the washer faces down against the sheet metal. Turn the piece of sheet metal over and drop a spring over the shaft, then press the remaining metal washer onto the shaft so it captures the spring and tensions it slightly. If you’ve done things correctly, when you push the shaft to the side, it will spring back to the middle. You may need to adjust the spring tension if the shaft doesn’t return all the way. If the shaft can’t move very much in any direction, you’ll need to enlarge the hole.

In the previous picture, you can see how the convex side of the washer allows the joystick to “roll” against the surface of the sheet metal. When you let go of the shaft, the spring tension pushes the shaft back to the center. The joystick action puts a lot of wear on the sheet metal which is why it’s important to use steel instead of a softer metal like brass or aluminum.

Now it’s time to begin mounting the switches to the sheet metal. You may want to lay them out by hand first just to make sure there is room for them all, and that the actuators end up in the right position. Skip ahead a few photos to see how I arranged my switches.

Position the switch so that the washer on the reverse side of the sheet metal will hit the actuator just right. You don’t want the washer pushing in too hard–the hole in the sheet metal should stop the shaft from moving to the side rather than the actuator in the switch itself. At this point you may need to adjust the bottom washer so that it lines up with the switch actuator. In my joystick, I had to use a different spring to get the correct tension when the bottom washer was lined up correctly.

When you are finished lining it up, mark the sheet metal where the hole should go (I just dropped a drill bit in the switch’s mounting hole and twirled it between my thumb and forefinger, holding the switch down with my other hand). After you drill the first hole, put a small machine screw into the hole and secure it with a nut on the other side. You can rotate the switch to fine tune its position so the washer hits it in the right place. When it’s dialed in, mark and drill the next hole.

In this photo most of the switches are mounted, and you can see that I’ve drilled one mounting hole for the last switch.

Once the last switch is mounted, take a look at the following photo and make sure that your washer hits every switch actuator correctly.

At this point I drilled some mounting holes in the corners and took the whole thing apart, and cut the mounting plate out of the larger piece of sheet steel. It’s easier to work with a larger piece of sheet metal when drilling holes and such rather than a tiny piece that is harder to clamp. After putting everything back together, the joystick now looks like this:

The joystick is finished, and it’s ready to be mounted in a front panel. For this joystick, I’ll probably mount it behind a 1/4″ thick piece of oak, so I will drill a big round hole for the joystick shaft and then use wood screws to mount the metal plate to the back of the wood. To dress up the front, I could use a piece of brass pierced with a plus-sign-shaped cutout to cover the hole in the wood like I did on my CRT clock in the first picture. As a finishing touch, I will mount a small wooden knob or perhaps a brass bead on the end of the joystick shaft.

For another project in progress, I needed to test the “off” leakage current of neon bulbs. Along the way I discovered some interesting things. First, let’s take a look at the test subjects.

The lamp on the left side is a brand new miniature-type, the middle lamp pretty much represents the average neon lamp, and the lamp on the right is a special “frosted” lamp that I pulled out of some old equipment. Sorry, I do not have type numbers for these lamps, and they are not marked. Some older neon lamps were marked with the type number when the seal was crimped.

The testing used a power supply adjustable from 0V to 40V and a Fluke 87 multimeter. Any good multimeter with a 10MΩ input impedance can be used to measure extremely low currents by wiring the meter in series (like an ammeter) while it is in volts mode. Tests of the tiny neon lamp and the “average” neon lamp used the meter in mV mode, while tests of the frosted lamp used the volts mode. The tests were conducted at room temperature at normal indoor lighting conditions. Before testing, each lamp was washed with 90% isopropyl alcohol and dried with canned air.

There are some very interesting observations to be made with this data. The tiny lamp exhibits very low leakage current, peaking at 200pA. The “average” neon lamp peaks at 2nA, and the frosted lamp peaks at 263nA. I tried a few more lamps of each type and although they vary quite a bit, each type of lamp approximates the same current as the data above. It is due to the construction of the lamps themselves. According to Techlib.com, the increased leakage current is due to the radioactive thorium present in the lamp electrodes.

If it’s possible for radiation to increase the leakage current, I surmised that a strong light source could increase it as well. Taking another “average” neon lamp, I measured a leakage of 2.8nA at 40V. When exposed to a very bright white LED flashlight, the leakage current increased to 11.0nA, and when exposed to an ultraviolet LED flashlight, the leakage current climbed to 16.6nA. It may be that the photons impinging on the electrodes cause electrons to “leap” from the outer electron shell of the metal atoms and drift (due to the electric field between the two electrodes) across to the opposing electrode. This shows up as the increased drift current.

By increasing the temperature of a neon bulb, I was able to increase the leakage current as well. At the same time, I discovered that some small amount of water vapor still remained as a film on the surface of the bulb. For the case of the tiny neon bulb, the leakage current of 200pA fell to 50pA after a few seconds of applied heat, invalidating my previous experiments. As the temperature of the bulb increased, the leakage current increased to 1100pA before I removed the heat. This principle is the same one that enables vacuum tubes to operate–the heated cathode generates a space charge “cloud” of electrons that drift depending on the applied potential.

For my application, I would rather not have any thorium in the lamp since I want the leakage current to be as low as possible.

Recently I purchased a number of nixie tubes from the local electronics flea market:

A few of them caught my eye. This Burroughs B-5448 one was most likely used in a calculator or possibly a meter to indicate plus and minus as well as the overload condition.

And this National NL-989 was used for indicating the unit or mode of a multimeter. There are two “partitions” in this nixie tube: one contains the symbols “A”, “M”, and “K”, while the other contains “C”, “V”, and “Ω”. The multimeter would have used this to indicate “AC”, “MV”, “KV”, “MΩ”, “KΩ”, and so on.

Notice how the glow is a different color in each tube? My camera did an excellent job of reproducing the correct color, so what you see is very close to what the ionized gas actually looks like. The National tube appears to contain mostly neon, while the Burroughs shows light blue “fringing”, indicating the presence of mercury, which was used to increase the lifespan of the tube.