President's Comments - March 2012
Jim Collings
It's time to get your contest items ready for our annual spring meet. It's at the Midwest City Community Center on Saturday April 14th, beginning at 8AM, and ending at noon. We will have our usual contest, swap meet, silent auction, and live auction. I'll publish the contest categories in next month's Broadcast News, but I do not expect a change from last year. So, there will be a category for anything you wish to display. Let's talk this up and try to get everyone who has an interest in our hobby to attend. The greater the attendance, the better the meet will be for all of us. This month's meeting topic will be the manufacturer, Western Electric. I'll bring a variety of horns, etc. for display and discussion. Feel free to bring anything you have. The meeting will be on Saturday, March 10th at the Hometown Buffet on NW Expressway, beginning at 7 PM with dinner before, generally about 6 PM. We will be finalizing plans for our big April meet, and will especially need help with publicity. Don't forget to bring something for the donation auction. As far as upcoming events, the VRPS is having their spring auction on March 17th. It will be held in Irving, Tx. at the Senter East Building, 228 Chamberlain St., the same as last year. It is in a residential area, so if you have not been there, it's best to use a GPS device to find it. The start time is 9:15 AM, as a trailer load of donated parts and unrestored radios will be sold before the main auction. It should be a good auction. It's not as big as the fall convention auctions, but there are always some good items as well as restoration parts available. Contact me for more details. I attended a 2 day, Jim Sargent auction last weekend in Quinlan, Tx., east of Dallas. A collector who was not associated with any radio clubs, and who began collecting in the late 1970's, donated everything to the Arms of Hope children's charity. Friday all the poorer items were sold from an empty house that was about to be restored. But there were a lot of good items, just dirty. Almost everything was selling at reasonable prices. I purchased enough to fill my vehicle, but needed more room for the next day, so gave away a lot of sets after salvaging the parts I needed. Saturday was the good stuff. There were numerous catalin sets, some in very nice condition, and there were some unique items that I had never seen before. A portion of the items were available for internet bidding, so those items tended to sell at higher prices, but generally prices were fair with many good buys. I ended up with the car not overly full, and regretted not buying some of the smaller tombstone sets which were selling at great prices. But, I don’t have room here at home for what I bought, so it is probably for the best.
See you at the meeting. Don't forget to bring your ideas for our big meet, and items for the donation auction, plus any Western Electric items you have for display.
Report for the OKVRC Meeting 2/11/2012
Perhaps I spoke too soon in last month's report when I mentioned we were having the 'winter that wasn't'. As it turned out, the weekend of our February meeting was actually cold! But it was dry, and with no snow or ice to impede us from driving, we had a good turnout of seventeen OKVRC members, spouses and guests for our usual meeting at the Hometown Buffet in Oklahoma City. As always, we enjoyed dinner from about 5:45 to 7:00, when Club President Jim Collings called the meeting to order. We heard some announcements about upcoming events, such as the VRPS Spring Auction in Irving, Texas, on March 17th. Jim also told us about the auction of the Jim Sargent collection, which is taking place on-line. We were also reminded to start planning for (and advertising) the April OKVRC Convention at the Midwest City Community Center on April 14th. We also learned about the liquidation of an old radio repair shop in Kansas, great deals on parts and stuff for anyone willing to make a long trip! The subject of tonight's meeting: Hints and tips related to the radio restoration hobby, in other words, tricks that we have learned over the years, as well as problems we hope someone else might have an answer for. Your club secretary started out by asking for help with a problem: how to restore plastic radio cabinets. Not ones that are cracked or broken, just ones that have become faded and weathered looking over decades of exposure to sunlight and the elements. To illustrate, I brought in two Zenith table radios from the early fifties: an AM radio in mint condition and a badly faded AM-FM model. I was hoping to find out a way for the second radio to be made as nice looking as the first. Several club members offered suggestions, but cautioned that it might not be possible to get the Bakelite material underneath all the way back to its original luster, since under the top finish, Bakelite (unlike Plastikon and Catlin) material contains a lot of 'filler'. The recommended way to restore a roughened plastic finish is to polish the cabinet with compounds of increasing fineness: starting with 0000 fine steel wool, or 600 sandpaper (used wet), followed by Brasso, rubbing polish, Novus # 3 plastic polish, lastly #2 Novus. The Brett’s Old Radios restoration DVD #4 covers plastic radio restoration in detail; I'll bring the club's copy to the March meeting in case anyone would like to take it home to watch. Dale McLellan brought in a tiny 1932 two-tube 'Kadett' radio in a plastic cabinet. The delicate plastic grill was broken; Dale has restored it to like new condition. Members also gave us tips on how to restring broken dial cords, while dial cord can be found in different thicknesses, .03 dia works well for most radios. Tips were offered on the way to replace phonograph drive belts, often an ordinary O-ring of the same diameter can be slipped onto the pulleys. It was recommended that the surface of the pulley be sanded to increase friction with the belt. Bleach can be used to clear dirt out of cracks and crevices in Plastikon cabinets without dissolving the plastic. Roger Knop brought in a homemade filament tester box and a gadget to straighten bent tube pins. Jim Collings showed us a homemade adapter to convert long pin 99 tubes to work in early sets with UV-199 sockets. Jim Rice explained how to restore the small electrostatic loudspeakers found in some postwar German radios, and showed us some examples of his work. In summary, we all learned something by sharing with other collectors some of the knowledge we have acquired over years of collecting and restoring. That alone is a good reason to belong to OKVRC! We wrapped up the evening with an auction of donated goodies. Several boxes of parts, a wood Zenith table radio, a cabinet from a 1924 Freed-Eisemann FE-15 radio, a Rider's index, RCA Pictoguides, QST magazines, a soldering gun, and several boxes of solid state portable radios and tape players found new homes. Most items went for a buck. See you at next month's meeting!
