Trying to FIX a RARE 1963 Globe Six Transistor Radio from eBay

i was born in 1963 and both me and the radio are just still barley functional but not as pretty as we once were . a great find vince another little gem saved

the cleaning montage is the most therapeutic sequence ive seen this year, Oscar worthy performance

+9 volts on the headphone jack: it is a 60's radio, which means they used germanium transistors, which were almost all PNPs. That means the positive 9 volts is actually like ground for the circuit!

I watched the Truman Show last night and he was using this radio. Great find Vince!

"I wish I could explain what these things do"- that's an air-dielectric tuning capacitor. The capacitance varies as the degree of overlap between the pairs of plates changes. The long rod thingy is a ferrite rod antenna. The combination of the tuning capacitor and the ferrite rod antenna (which is an inductor) forms a tuned circuit to pick up one particular station.

I think the reason why you were confused of the Speaker/Headphone jack connection to the positiv of the battery is, because in most cases the Speaker and headphone jack-negative are connected to the negative Battery terminal while the positive comes from the Transistor Amp. You can build these simple Amps for using with positive or negative connections. When using Amplifier ICs sometimes you can choose where you want to connect the Speaker. It makes no difference as long as you take care of the polarity of the Speaker. But in any case it requires a decoupling capacitor at the Amplifier Output to block DC to the Speaker and headphone. These capacitors also helps to generate the needed AC Output Signal to drive a Speaker in the right way (push-pull) without using a symmetrical Voltage Source.

That is one gorgeous radio. That style actually looks older than '63. Could be retro. Fantastic.

Nice radio. Nice restauration. Good work. I would just test the radio circuit first, before spending time in cleaning it. ...although, in this case, I'd clean it anyway and if the circuit would be a total loss, I'd probably gut another battery transistor radio and transplant its circuit board in this cute little radio globe. This radio has the positive battery terminal connected to ground and the negative terminal is basically the supply voltage. This is because the germanium PNP transistors of that time worked better than the NPN ones. So they used PNP instead of NPN. In that case, a negative supply voltage and positive ground would be more practical. Nowadays, silicon NPN is the more common transistor so now virtually everything uses a positive supply voltage and a negative ground. You're lucky that this radio worked the first time trying, after that big cleaning effort. Transistors of that era were not very reliable. You should search for a suitable screw to help hold on that brittle bottom plate. If that thing ever breaks again, then I would replace it by a cut-to-size piece of plastic board, or 3D-print something suitable, and attach two 3xAA battery holders onto it. Those are available from Ebay/Aliexpress/Banggood. And of course, I would keep all of the original parts of the bottom plate. And what's with that antenna? Is it even connected? MW and LW stations are easy to pick up with just the internal bar antenna.

It looks like a Holy hand grenade.

Hi well done on fixing the globe radio. you inspire us all not to throw away things when they can be fixed.

Hi Vince. Love the channel and your Trying to Fix series. This is my favorite "fix" so far of yours. I love the care you put into making things work and whole again. Thanks for the hours of entertainment and information!

Nostalgia... 😪 We had one of them in our home. We used to tune into Radio Luxemberg. I don't know if it still exists. Thanks for posting. Incredible channel you have. Just came by trying to fix the nozzle on my dirt blaster. 👍

I'm glad you opened a patreon, I know we all can't pay, but the few people that have the money should be thanked for their generous contribution. I'm glad you have the resources to make videos.

It's always satisfying to clean up something that's really dirty like this just seeing how clean it is after and seeing how nice it looks.

What a wonderful project Sir! Thank you so very much for finding something antique and giving it new life its greatly appreciated.

Such a joy to see these old electronics come back to life. Superb stuff yet again...

9:07 They are variable capacitors. They are used to tune to different radio station by changing the capacity along with an inductor( when the capacitance changes the resonance frequency changes). These capacitors change capacitance by inserting a set of semi circles inside to other set of hemi circles. One set of hemi circles are fixed and one lead of capacitor is that and other set of semi circles are movable and is the other lead of the capacitor. When we rotate the knobe the plate move inwards and the area of the two plates of capacitor increase and thus the capacitance increase ( capacitance is directionaly proportion to area of plate). Note : this is an air core capacitor aka the dielectric is air. This is as far as i know Thank you I am a great fan of your videos sir, all the best

Absolutely brilliant Vince as always keep it up.

Back in '63 tube(valve) radios were still in wide use. Great video. I'm glad you got it to work.

That has to be one of my favorite things you have fixed. Beautiful piece I may have to look for something similar to fix