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The
re-inauguration of a "Queen"
(restoration of the Arvin "Rhythm Queen")
the Arvin "Rhythm Queen" model 927 circa 1936
This rare beauty was
given to me by my brother George about 15 years ago and I
finally completed the restoration. While visiting my family &
home town, George showed me his acquisition and I
immediately fell in love with the dial and style of this seldom
seen set. George had given it his best effort in a cabinet
refinish job and stored it in my mothers closet pending further
tasks to complete the job. The speaker was missing, knobs long
gone, the grill cloth was a piece of burlap and the chassis was
quite crustily and rather" unwholesome to look at. When I told
my brother I would like to restore it for my collection, he
generously obliged with a gift to me of this fine radio. Below
are some of the details behind this (one of my most ambitious)
restorations.
Getting it home
I then packed and
shipped it from Kentucky to my home in Oregon, shipping the
chassis & cabinet in separate boxes. It remained packed in those
boxes for about 6 years before moving to Washington state and
here it remained untouched for another 7 years. I wanted to
restore it but every time I thought about how ugly & dirty the
chassis was plus the fact that I did not have knobs & speaker
just caused further procrastination.
the chassis before
restoration, click on any above images to enlarge
Missing parts At
one of our local swap meets last year I found a speaker of the
right size and type and it even had the "Arvin" name on it. I
purchased it hoping it would have the correct specs to go with
the chassis and I "lucked" out! With that, I decide to tackle
the task of binging this baby (uh..."Queen") back to life. As
for knobs I found a fellow that duplicated for me a nice
original looking set made of hardwood and now have his services
listed on the "resources" page of
my site.
The chassis
The physical construction of the chassis is quite unusual and in
no way represents the typical inexpensive construction of most
"Arvin's". A shallow design of two separate chassis's with the
RF section floating in the middle of the main one. The main
chassis is form pressed of 13 gage steel (not a budget minded
process).
The challenge
The capacitors used (and there are many) are all mounted above
chassis in steel cans (and of course all leaky). With the
shallow chassis this presented a bit of a problem of the normal
practice of installing new ones on the underside while leaving
the old cans in place. This was not possible (at least not in a
neat manner). So I decided that I would remove all the cans and
re-stuff them. Removing all the chassis components was necessary
anyway in order to do a proper job of cleaning.
Cleaning the chassis
All components were removed except the tube sockets in order to
clean the caked on crud. First a drawing was in order to make it
easier to re-install these parts. Then the RF sub-chassis was
removed along with the dial mechanism and tuning condenser. The
rusty and crusted areas were first scraped with a sharp putty
knife, then wire brushed to remove the scale & built up stuff. I
then cleaned the chassis with a product called "Flash" and
industrial metal cleaner. This finalized the process and brought
the chassis to nice clean metal finish. The tuning condenser was
washed (first I removed the mica trimmer insulators) in a
solution of ammonia and a product called "Oil Eater". After it
was cleaned & thoroughly dried I checked it for shorts using my Heathkit
IT-28 capacitor checker with 300 volts applied. By applying high
voltage across the capacitor plates this will also burn away any of the crystalline
"whiskers" that are sometime present in tuning condensers. The
tuning condenser was remounted and the RF chassis reinstalled.
Rebuilding the
"canned" capacitors As with all my restorations, I
wanted to keep the above chassis looking 100% original. All the
original capacitors were removed from the chassis and gutted
This was done by carefully sawing off a small section of the
bottom and removing the insides. New capacitors were then
stuffed inside the original and filled with non viscous epoxy.
After the epoxy cured, if the leads were not long enough, they
were bent to form a small circular terminal connections. The
large electrolytic capacitors were also done in the same manner
except I did not fill them with epoxy, the modern replacements
were just held in place inside the cans with a little RTV.
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