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https://www.youtube.com/user/glasslinger is a good YouTube channel that shows the servicing of these and other vintage radios.
Paul Carlson also has a pretty big body of work when it comes to lots of things vacuum tube, lots of A5 restores. https://www.youtube.com/@MrCarlsonsLab
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110v can fuck you up. Don’t take your own advice please. At least no one else should. Isolation transformer will only stop you getting killed one of three ways. Worth backing my experience up as well. Ex EE covering RF and power in defence sector. There is no room for arrogance or assumptions in dealing with safety.
How would you work on these things?
The hot chassis design is mind-blowingly dangerous by contemporary standards. These things weren't designed to modern creepage distances either. I would worry about creepage to controls on these things. THe article mentions screws potentially being hot as well as other shock hazards finger-accessible through vent hols so no joke be careful to unplug a radio before moving it or otherwise handling it in a way beyond tu…
I avoid anything over 12 volts or 15 amps, but I wouldn't call this mind-blowingly dangerous. Working on Kilowatt amplifiers with 3KV at 1 amp ready to burn you to a crisp, that's dangerous. In Europe, with 220+ volt lines, I'd have a different opinion.
But today, would you build something that puts one side of an unpolarized plug onto finger-accessible screws and then give it to a neighbor?
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I'm sitting next to one of these: https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/benrus_clock_radio_10b01b15b_1... With nice Telechron clock..
Does it work? (I hope it does!)
Like many of these it uses a "couplet" (early IC) for the audio inter-stage coupling.
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I avoid anything over 12 volts or 15 amps, but I wouldn't call this mind-blowingly dangerous. Working on Kilowatt amplifiers with 3KV at 1 amp ready to burn you to a crisp, that's dangerous. In Europe, with 220+ volt lines, I'd have a different opinion.
I think you misunderstand. "Mind-blowing" is not about the courage or skill it takes to work on them, and it's in relative terms. They didn't have contemporary safety standards back then, so I don't think the manufacturers were being completely feckless. All that had to be learned. But today, would you build something that puts one side of an unpolarized plug onto finger-accessible screws and then give it to a neighb…
For example, I recently helped a friend get his grandfather's 1949 Airline Television working. There were some interesting aspects of that circuit.
My late father had a mint condition Sunbeam Automatic Toaster he loved to show off. It has a hot chassis.
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Back in high school(1980), my chemistry teacher, Mr Tchalo had an old conductivity demonstration apparatus that was essentially an incandescent light bulb in series with two copper prongs that would dip into a beaker.
After explaining how it worked, he would slowly pinch them together, then challenge us to do the same. I never tried it. As I said, anything more than 12 volts or 15 amperes, and I get scared.
Mr Tchalo was from the old school of teaching, he had been brought back from retirement to fill out the staffing levels required for certification. He spoke with a heavy accent and had some seriously thick glasses, his eyes had been injured in a gas attack in his childhood in Macedonia during The Great War. He was one of my favorite teachers ever.
Even when the local department store was selling home computers based on microprocessors, they still devoted a chunk of retail floor space to a self-service vacuum tube tester. https://www.ebay.com/itm/195497221166 https://www.ebay.com/itm/324762243586 https://www.ebay.com/itm/403979880899 I wonder when these finally disppeared from stores, and what the market is like for vacuum tubes for antique TVs and radios?
There are a lot of NOS television and radio tubes out there, and they are mostly less expensive than the ones used in guitar amplifiers and hi-fi equipment.
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Polarised cord only works if your house sockets are wired correctly which is not necessarily the case and your earth bond might not be as good as you think it is. Always assume that the lowest competence is applied when it comes to safety evaluation. At this point I wouldn’t run one of these things at all. If you drop dead you have no idea if some relative is going to plug it in and kill themselves with it. They were…
Please do not willy-nilly dispose of beautiful pieces of interior design which likely won't ever be produced again with similar aesthetics. [1] People constantly throwing away cultural heritage without any second thoughts is the reason why we barely have any left from only even more than 100 or 200 years ago - thousands of years of furniture, decoration, etc. are gone. If you don't want them to be dangerous, make the…
At the very least, if the alternative is full disposal, the old ones could be upgraded with modern electronics.
Definitely read the potential hazards section. Dangerous as hell these things.
Many consumer appliances are also still unisolated inside, it saves cost and you are unlikely to be touching anything inside if you don't know what you're doing (hence the usual "do not open" warnings on them.)