Radio Another Bakelite disaster! GEC BC4941

Yes, I know… Bakelite in the post is a dumb idea… some of us will never learn! But in my defence, these sets are built like a brick you know what, and it takes a hell of a lot of force to do this much damage! But never mind, it’s not cost me anything, other than a bit of time!

So what to do with it? Well first things first, it’s not as terrible as it first looks! Good points are the chassis and valves are all perfectly OK, the speaker is good, it’s nice and clean with very little corrosion (unlike the other one I have!) and the rear cover survived completely undamaged. The bad bits, the front case is in 3 pieces…. And it’s green Bakelite, which I find the most difficult to repair! And the tuning dial glass is in a million pieces.

To begin with I thought it’d be good to see how much work the chassis needs, so I borrowed the 6V to 90V inverter that I made from the Bush BP10, got a new battery for it and connected it up. Absolutely nothing happened when trying to power it up! So I connected it up to the bench power supplies instead, so I could see if either HT or LT were drawing current, neither were, so I immediately thought the valves had probably croaked due to being bashed, or someone plugging in a 9V to the filaments (I’ve done that before, when I was little!). Each valve was pulled and checked, and all found to be ok, so it must be something else, the battery wires checked out fine, so I pointed the finger at the switch, I gave it a good blast of Servisol, and then exercised it, which got it drawing current at last! There was a bit of crackling when switching, but not much of anything else. I got the circuit up, and had a look for the audio coupling cap, on this set it’s a wax covered mica thing, and they are normally good, and this one was, no leakage, but there is another audio coupling cap on the volume control, which is a wax covered paper cap, it didn’t seem leaky, but I’ve disconnected it and tacked in something new just to see if it made a difference, it didn’t! After a while the current draw on the HT started to rise, and the 4uf HT cap was heating up, so that too was disconnected and an ill fitting replacement tacked in. I tried using the MiniMod pantry transmitter to get a signal through it, and I could receive that, but it was still quiet. Careful fiddling with the tuning could bring in Absolute radio very quietly too. I had noticed the red sealing paint On the first IF adjuster had crumbled off, but so far I’d managed to resist the temptation to twiddle it! But I gave in and found the adjuster to be quite loose, possibly from being bashed, and giving it a little turn suddenly livened things up a bit, so much in fact that I had to turn the volume down! I set it so that Absolute radio was nice and loud, I will probably do a proper alignment on it later, but as it is, the set is now pulling in stations loud and clear on both bands with just the frame aerial. It is also now running on the 6V inverter, which can be placed neatly inside the set to keep it portable.

So now another dilemma! I have another of these sets, in a rather less than pleasant brown colour, cabinet is mint,  but the chassis is a mess in that one, and it’s speaker is completely rotten, it’s also been in bits in a box since 2017! I’m tempted to take the chassis from the green one and put it in the brown cabinet, but I’d really like to get the green cabinet back together, and keep the good chassis in that. And I still need a new dial, well 2 of them, as the one from the brown one is broken too!! I think I’ll just house the chassis in the brown cabinet for now while I work on repairing the green one.

I’ve tried test fitting the pieces back together, but found it almost impossible to get all the bits back, I think this is going to take some very delicate work with the dremmel to get the bits fitting nicely before I can glue them! I will be using my tried and tested method of good old cyanoacrylate to repair it, but I want to find the low viscosity type again, as it’s great at seeping into the cracks, sadly it’s also good at making a run for it out of the bottle, even with the lid on! I lost a bottle of it when we moved house, as it managed to escape and glue everything in the box it was in to the bottom of the box!

 Regards 

Lloyd