Radio Rehab: Farnsworth EK-264

Shopping our little city's amnesty week is a real exercise in self-control.

For those of you who are not familiar, amnesty week is what the city calls the one week per year when items previously excluded from trash pick-up gets a reprieve, and neighbors pile their yards with all sorts of interesting items for discard.

There are restrictions of course, which often people ignore. Why? Because the garbage collectors get there long after the vintage collectors. (It's also a great time to pick metal for scrapping, which is why I'm so rarely able to find any cool metal objects for reuse.)

I don't even have to tell you how happy amnesty week makes me. It's like free shopping, antique picking, and treasure hunting all rolled into one.

So that brings me to my favorite find, which is the result of my refusal to do anymore curbside "shopping."

Naturally, when I refuse to shop anymore is when all the really good stuff gets put out. Such was the case when my husband came home one afternoon and said, "there's an old radio two houses up."

Um... yeah. It took me about 10 minutes to run up the road, call my husband to bring the car, load the radio into the car, and put it lovingly in my living room. The stickers on the back told us it was a Farnsworth EK-264. Google told us it was a chairside console radio circa 1946- 1947.

A real working radio with all (or at least most) of the parts was too much to ask. This thing was gutted (I assume in order to make it useful). The speaker was the only original part left.

 So, as you can see, the case was in great shape. The insides... not so much. Plus the radio's most recent rejuvenation was no longer adequate in order for it to be useful for us.

We could have gone three different routes. The first was to restore it as much as possible. The second was to completely overhaul the components of the radio. The third was to haul it back out to the curb.

Option two was going to be the best choice for us. We would have loved to restore it, but honestly we don't know a lot about old radios, are super cheap, and also use a lot of Bluetooth.

Well, well, well... looka here...

After all this time, the light still worked in the tuner. We did replace the bulb with a yellow LED. The original bulb still worked, but we did not know for how long. Therefore, we decided that once we had its guts out, we should give it a little fine tuning. That pun was totally intended.

I ordered some vintage-looking speaker cloth on Amazon and replaced the ripped and torn cloth using a staple gun.

As far as the components go... the most useful, least expensive, and easiest idea we could come up with would be to replace the insides with a car radio and speaker. Which is what we did. We also liked that this meant that there would be little to no damage to the case, making it easily reversible if we wanted to legitimately restore it in the future.

 In order to make this work, my husband plugged the car stereo into an old computer power supply. He had to cut a few boards in order to make the new speaker and radio stable. Then, he painted the boards black so that it "blended in" a bit more. As it only needs to be opened to change settings, it's not a big deal to us that it is just very simple on the inside.

(Note: I did polish the case and dust the inside. I did not notice the dust was quite so bad until I'm blowing up pictures on my blog! Lesson learned. A fine toothbrush cleaning is in store for next time.)