Hornyphon Super Prince 41W W236A (1940)

Made in Vienna between 1939-1941. The factory founded in mid-20s by Mr. Horney had made over 500,000 radios before the factory was destroyed during WWII. This unit somehow ended up in Berlin and due I suspect to the lack of 30's valves got converted to valves from the years 1952-1958 by somebody unknown. He did a very nice job of fixing aluminum plates over the old large valve holes and installed new holders and a complete re-wire underneath, this included the flower designed speaker cloth that first drew me to the set, looking very flower-power styled of the mid-60s, my guess is that it was re-built around then. 

The repair

To remove the set from the cabinet 4 wires need to be extended to the speaker wiring, take care to not mix them up. The later valves used here are run from 2 x 6.3v windings on the mains transformer + the dial lights. I found a doggy connector to the mains fuse and the set only had a 220v mains selector, the switch had a 240 setting but no wires attached. The set will run but it will shorten the valve lives due to nearly 2 extra volts on the heaters. So the answer was to fit an auto-transformer inside cabinet set to 120V and set the range to 120v on the old transformer to match.

Top view showing plates that had been fitted for later valves and even smoothers

The under view of modified chassis, high quality components had been used

During the restoration bass and treble tone controls had been fitted, I added an earth wire to the chassis to make it safer and also to help reception. The set receives Long wave, Medium and Short wave bands and has a very extensively labelled dial that during WWII anyone found listening to foreign broadcast could be shot or imprisoned by the Germans, so these sets may have been sold underground only.

I've included a circuit for the original set, but wasn't much help to me. I contacted the seller about the un-published changes and asked if he had the newer circuit, but wasn't any help offered there. Luckily the set was running as soon as I fixed the fuse wiring and fitted UK voltage adapter. Most of my time was spent resorting the cabinet top. I removed the old varnish with paint stripper and a scraper and sanded the wood dye away and re-varnished and lacquered the top after. The grain in the wood was mirror imaged around the center of the top - stunning.

The new top. She's quite a large set and cost 50 euros to mail from Berlin, it arrived in a box the size of a washing machine. Still worth the trouble, even though now not original, it's as close as I could get it and still working. See video for short demo of it working....