Wanted – Information on Chisholm Radios

[Gerry O’Hara]

I have a Chisholm radio, donated to me about 3 years ago by one of my colleagues at work when he retired and moved to Costa Rica. The set was bought (new) in the early 1950’s for his wife by her parents when she was a girl living somewhere on north Vancouver Island after a spell she had in hospital – she had kept it ever since. My Chisholm is not the best looking of radios but the cabinet is very solid and contains a large speaker. I removed the chassis, but have done nothing with it (yet). I could not find any information on the set and even contacted Lloyd Swackhammer after failing to see Chisholm Industries mentioned in his most excellent book ‘Radios of Canada’ (https://www.hammondmuseumofradio.org/lloyds_book.html). Lloyd very kindly wrote back and said that Chisholm was mentioned in the first edition of his book, but somehow got missed when he revised it. He confirmed that they were based in the Vancouver area and sent me some information from the first edition of his book (see attached scan) and some schematics. Unfortunately the model that he sent the schematics for was not mine… I mentioned this to folks at the SPARC museum in Coquitlam and garnered some more tidbits about Chisholm, one of which was that their manufacturing plant was a long dome-roofed blue-painted building located on Moody Street/Electronic Ave in Port Moody (hence the name ‘Electronic Ave.’, which I had wondered about for some time, passing it every day on my way to the office). I think it was mentioned that they also made TV’s. Another SPARC member mentioned recently that he had just bought a Chisholm ‘chairside’ radio that he was interested in obtaining a schematic for plus any other information relating to Chisholm as part of a bit of local radio history research – a most worthy cause. Any help would be very much appreciated!

I have attached a couple of photos of my Chisholm, Model No. 630, dating from 1950(ish).

Gerry

Download DSC00002 [1024×768].JPG. (Caution: This file may not be virus scanned.)

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Download Chisholm Radios [1024×768].jpg. (Caution: This file may not be virus scanned.)

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