[Ed Kraushar]

I picked up this little one tube homebrew radio at a recent auction.

It had a Corona label glued inside the lid and it appeared to be patterned after it, perhaps a kit of parts.

The case is rough but cleaned up reasonably well with a quick wipe of aniline stain and a wipe of shellac over the original shellac finish. It is still pretty rough but perhaps the builder had limited skills and I wanted to respect his work.

The radio has a hand wound tapped coil, rheostat, tuning capacitor, grid leak and an addition hand wound coil sealed in a red packet. The tube used is a 215A indicating that the radio is a fairly early one.

Since 215A tubes, even the dead ones, are very expensive I am reluctant to use one when I am testing an unkown radio. As a substitute I use a subminature tube, a 5676 triode. It works reasonably well as a 215A sub and the long leads allow it to be attached to the 215A socket using the thumbscrews. I should get around to building an adapter base for the 5676’s.

Other than repairing some poor solder joints only the grid leak resistor had to be restuffed to get the radio to play. Performance is fair out in the country here but may have been acceptable in a larger city with a choice of high power stations.

Ed.

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