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Posted by David Sherman on Saturday, December 27, 2008 at 21:00:08 :
In Reply to: I thought so to Gary! posted by Eric B. on Saturday, December 27, 2008 at 16:47:51 :
I guess we'll find out come Feb 1st (maybe he meant April 1st?) when the "buy it now" listing appears on ebay. My thinking goes like this. Maybe he got them for $50 for the whole container at an estate auction or for cleaning out an abandoned storage unit, and he doesn't know what they're worth. Maybe also, there's a hot market amongst maybe 12 guys on this forum who would pay $1200 for one, but there aren't 88 other people in the whole world who would pay more than $120 for one. In other words, if he wants to sell them all quickly, the price needs to be considerably less than the top price ever paid for one when they were scarce.
On the other hand, what makes me suspicious is that he says he tested a "random sampling" (how many is that?) and they all worked fine. I've restored a fair number of old tube-powered radios (have two in the shop right now), and one thing that I can almost be certain of is that no radio that hasn't been powered up for 40+ years will "work fine". It's not that the tubes go bad (which is what people usually think). It's that the capacitors go bad. The electrolytics are almost always dried out, the oil-filled caps have leaked their oil, and the paper ones, which are sealed with bee's wax, have probably gotten warm and the bee's was has melted. Also, it's a good bet that vinyl-covered wire from the '50s is now very crunchy and will crumble when bent to any extent. Old rubber-covered wire exudes a nasty gummy oil. Only cloth-insulated wire of that vintage seems to hold up.
Anyway, I would be extremely amazed if the first few units he tried out of this container load actually worked. In addition, any radio that's that old can be improved quite a bit by aligning it. Those old radios were supposed to be aligned from time to time, but nobody does it any more. The performance (sensitivity and selectivity) degrades over the years if they're not aligned.