RCA Victor A25 restoration

This one is a proudly Canadian RCA Victor A-25 made in Montreal in early 40s. 

As the most radios this time it doesn't have a permanent magnet speaker and is using a field coil instead. The cabinet was in a poor state (I wish I saved "before" pictures, but I did not). Lot of work was done including:

• full re-cap,
• adding extra drop resistor to a power circuit as need to drop extra voltage,
• changing a grille cloth,
• changing a speaker to a suitable 6,5'' one,
• cabinet sanding to the wood and applying a stain and endless coats of lacquer, 
• adding an FM module,
• adjusting a schematic to accommodate to FM sound,
• adding a three prong power socket and a fuse

It all started with the power circuit and the need of dropping around 100V B+ voltage as there is no field coil any more. See that little stripe of alumni with a 10W 1.5K resistor mounted on the other side of it? That wasn't even enough and I had to put another cement 470Ohm in series.

Once power was all set, I moved to the receiver. Again, I didn't bother myself restoring shortwaves and concentrated on amplifier and FM reception. As the original circuit didn't have FM, I installed an FM module which was bought on E-Bay for about $60.

The FM module desires a couple words itself as it is the masterpiece. Built by David Winter it has an Automatic Frequency Control, mono\stereo options, and can drive a magic eye tube. I'd highly recommended this one if you are looking to get an FM reception to your beloved old tube radio. Here is David's site: FM-DW 3.0 FM converter module

For the amplifier, I had to move a pre-amp 6SQ7 from a grid leaking bias to the fixed bias. This gives enough headroom to the pre-amp. Another adjustment was to swap all capacitors on the signal path, so they have a wider frequency range.

Finally I got a nice looking and very nice sounding FM radio. The downside was a lot of expenses so I listed it for $325 and still looking for a new owner lol. 

PS: The radio was sold on October 11th to Ricky from New Brunswick for $230. Not much of a profit, but covered all expenses at least.