Over the years a number of these have come up for sale on French eBay, but mainly without the clock versions, but a badly broken display example came up for sale, and in the UK so I jumped after it, after all it quite old for a transistor radio with a Swiss clock timer fitted. Anyway it was a challenge and I love them. Apparently they were made under a few manufacturers names and clock-less versions in more colours; blue, red, yellow and white I have see.
the repair
The seller kindly sent me a new battery, 4.5 v (old bicycle lamp types) that 9/10 French radios use and are still available. No real electrical faults apart from the on/off switch wires had fell off the timer rear. The clock has jammed, it may need demagnetising being located so near to the speaker magnet, I'll try that another day perhaps. The first real job was to fix the broken display front. The two halves of the cabinet are spring tight only at the top and the bottom of the set. Once parting I removed the speaker wires and two cables to the on/off switch, just to give me lots of free space to dismantle the display. The tricky bit was removing the plastic self fixing rivets.
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| broken wires from on/off to timer |
Once I realised that the centre pin came out first then the outer holder. After that I removed the aluminium handle that was almost 'S' shaped from stress over the years. Once removed it was quit easy the straighten it back to a 'U' shape again. Two countersunk screws hold the display in place, they were hidden under the handle.
I cut the broken section of the window away so I could fit a new section of clear plastic in it's place. I had a piece of clear PVC that was left over from another job I did and I only needed a small section to be cut, see photo, white area is the the new section, glued in with just UHU clear glue. Afterwards I thought I would spay the back black like the original, but I've run out of black spray and decided for now just to fit some black card to the rear.
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| Just before I fitted black card to the rear |
The next job was to put some LED's on the display, because LED's are so directional and there is lots of information on the dial I decided to fir two of them to the moving pointer, one throwing light at MW names and the other doing the same for LW names, and at the same time will just light the names you are tuning to. This requires very thin wire to be fitted to the moving pointer with some extra for the movement needed.
I wired the LED's in parallel across the 4.5 volt rail via a 56 ohm shunt resistor. This gave ample light for the job. I made a hole 1/2 way between the two ends of the pointer travel to allow the thin copper wire to travel freely.
Above is the dial chord before I modded it, also to help the LED's light I painted the trails behind the names on the dial with with white paint to better illuminate the names. Some switch cleaner was spayed on the band switches, shown here (top left)
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Component side (left) and print layout and aerial coils on the (right). Speaker wires are yellow. The set has also got an aerial socket for in car use. |
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