Ekco A22

E.K Cole A22 fully resored and working well on a short aerial wire.

When this 1945 radio came up for sale with the seller saying, "just needs repairing," I jumped at the opportunity even though it was a 460 mile round trip to fetch it.. The previous owner, another radio collector from a Mill near St. Austall in Cornwall had already done most of the hard work, although I spent a day getting it to work again. He had purchased it and it was badly damaged during the posting proses and he glued the pieces and and filled, then sprayed satin black to match original finish, changed tuning cable, and also fitted a modern replacement tuning dial and found an original un-used speaker cloth too!!

The repair
I started by giving the volume control a audio signal from my signal generator, and got no audio, so next I checked all the biasing components around the sound output valve.

some of the 'doggy' parts

Most were alright, so in my mind I'm thinking try the valve, luckily I had two spare un-tested ones in my junk room, but they made no difference either. So next I checked the windings of the sound output transformer, they were fine, speaker was alright too, what next? At this point I was sidetracked into checking other stages in the set. I started by looking at the signals to the grid of the first RF valve/oscillator and good signal was found there, I cleaned the rotary band switch contacts to gain signals from all bands.

the print has been made circular to fit around the circular shape (extra effort - well done Ekco)

Next I checked the anode voltage of the oscillator triode section of the RF amp and found no voltage, checked the HT load resistor R7 a 47k ohm, and it was open circuit. Also some of the coupling 'c's were also doggy so they were replaced. (I use a Chinese capacitor tester - cheep on line)  Anyway it was getting late in the day before I realised that the RF valve was fitted in the sound output socket and and the sound valve was in the RF socket ?????? When swapping them around the anode cable for the RF valve wouldn't reach? strange, anyway I lengthened the cable and switched-on, boom it worked again after who knows how many years? The 1 Meg volume control was open circuit, I found another but the spindle was too short, so I extended it with a ratchet fitting from a socket set and another piece of spindle from a donor control.

volume/on-off spindle extension (where I glued a washer was fitted to hold back the glue from the control)

I must say fixing a circular upright chassis is quite strange, chances of electric shocks are very high when out of your comfort zone, so be careful, HT is over 300v on this set. The last owner tells me he never removed the valves, so it just shows how long these old boys have been resting. Good news for the valves as they have more life left in them.

Photo shows behind the tuning dial/speaker cloth  

There are some components hidden behind the tuning dial, also to check voltages on valve bases you'll need to remove the dial, it's easily done by by inserting a long screwdriver through a hole at the 4 pm position of the drum to release a grub screw, then the whole face falls away.

Above shows the components in the aerial tuning circuits, 3 x LW,MW & SW coils and 3 x their oscillator coils, all can be resistance checked from the grids of the V1 valve. Also the original faulty 1 meg ohm volume control can be seen before I replaced it.

Circuit diagram for Ekco A44  (one wire lost in crease of page under volume resistor?)

The PDF manual can be found on-line easily, but the circuit is spit in two, here I joined them together, showing doggy or suspect components circled in red.

These are extremely valuable sets even when not working, but working does increase the value a great deal. reception on short wave is very good and with the extended almost 350 degrees of  dial space tuning a station-in is a dream. If your thinking of restoring one, take your time and it's well worth the effort as she is a 'cover piece' on many books and magazines over the years and a must have for the collector of nice looking radios.