Mike Pusateri's Cruftbox is one of my guilty pleasures. Mike runs an IT shop at Disney TV in beautiful downtown Burbank and has a wonderful blog where he takes apart and puts together all kinds of stuff. He is one of these people that are fascinated with the world around him, and has a very drole sense of humor that makes reading his posts fun too.
Here is a post about an old vacuum tube radio that he found at a garage sale. For those of you that are too young to appreciate this, vacuum tubes were the things that did what ICs do now, only using a heap more power and a heckuva lot bigger. What really made this post for me wasn't just that he picked up an old radio, and that it worked just fine, but that the radio included a schematic diagram of its components. They did that back in the day, you know — included the docs as part of the overall package. Something that our current electronics vendors could learn from.
How delighted I was to find your article. Please help, my daughter has a school project to label the parts of an old radio. We have one a little older than yours that I inherited from an uncle, our only problem is that we don’t know what all the parts are. I recognized the vaaccum tubes when we removed the back, but what is the solid looking metal object about the same size as the tubes? Ours has two o these in it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.