Raspberry Pi Retro Radio – Part 1

Last year I saw this awesome looking tube radio on ebay. I immediately fell in love with the charming smile and the huge teeth of this little fella and had to make my bid. At that time I was hoping to be able to repair it and have a nice looking tube radio.

But as it turned out it was broken beyond repair and also had a huge crack in it’s housing. Since I own a Sonos Play 5 and really enjoy the concept, I wondered how I could turn my new acquisition into something similar. What I wanted to build was a streaming player that would be able to play music from spotify and would keep the original look & feel and sound of the tube radio. Now I want to share my mistakes and successes in a sequence of blog posts.

What you need

• Screwdriver, Pincer etc.
• Dremel
• Soldering iron
• Sandpaper (different grains)
• 2 component glue
• Solvent-containing varnish (transparent and a color you enjoy)
• Brush and/or roller

Strip Down

First of all I had to get rid of the complete interior of the radio. Since I wanted to keep the tuning scale fully functional I left the mechanics intact and only got rid of the electronic parts. Be sure to not have the radio plugged in and be very careful so that you don’t damage the housing when opening it or removing any parts. In my case it seems like someone already tried fixing the cracks and some other stuff on it already. Actually you can see how someone tried to glew the golden mash behind the scale to the housing…

After separating the interior from the housing I used a pincer and a soldering iron to remove all electronical parts. The Dremel was also very handy cutting of a few parts and it’s a fun tool also. 😉

On the pictures below you can see that I basically left only the bare metal.

Cleaning

After disassembling everything some parts needed cleaning. I used dishwashing tablets for the buttons and controls – which worked out pretty well – and some liquid soap and microfiber tissues for the more sensitive parts.

Repair and painting of the housing

The housing had a huge crack so I used some sand paper to remove the original paint to try to repair it. Since I don’t own a sander I accomplished it by hand. Then I used some two component glue to fix the crack and let it dry for a day or two. Again I used the sandpaper to create a clean finish.

The original color of the radio was ivory. Because I wanted the radio to look pretty much the same I decided to use a similar color for the paint job. I used some water based coating, which I actually wouldn’t recommend, since you can’t get that smooth surface with it that u can get with solvent-containing coatings. After each coating you should a use some fine grained sand paper to roughen the surface a bit.

After 5 coatings of color I put on 3 coatings of transparent varnish. After all I’m satisfied with the result I got, even if it is not perfect. I did not pin stripe the housing since I liked it much better this way. It seemed more modern and clean.

Scale repair

When I stripped down the radio and was cleaning the base plate I accidently cut the drive cord of the scale with the metal brush attached to the Dremel – Yes I know sometimes even I am clumsy. I found a new one on ebay for a few bucks after measuring the length and diameter of the original one. I did not have a picture of the intact wiring so I had to do some googling to find an old manual for the radio explaining how to mount a new one.

After a bit of fiddling I managed to get it working again. Don’t worry if you fail a few times. My first attempt failed when I was nearly finished and was trying to clamp the wire… Yeah one might expect I cut it… And no usually I’m not that clumsy, I guess it had something to do with that god damn rope. 🙂

The next part is going to show you what hardware I used to get this thing going.