'64 GE transistor clock radio

[radiotvnut]

I bought this small GE clock radio from someone on ARF. It has a heavy metal chrome front and a top firing speaker. The radio worked OK; but, I decided to recap it because I want it to be reliable for a long time. I must say that this radio ranks right up there as being the hardest to take apart and service. To remove the chassis, the wires from the power transformer primary and the dial light wires must be unsoldered. Then, once all the screws are removed, the tuning capacitor shaft must be carefully slid off the drum, taking care not to mess up the dial string. This set uses 3 subassemblies that are soldered to the main PC board. In order to replace any parts on these subassemblies, the subassembly must be desoldered and removed from the PC board.

From date codes on the capacitors, this radio was made in '64. And, I'm surprised it uses a power transformer. It seems that the later GE radios, even up into the '80's, used a dropping resistor in the AC line.

The radio now works better and the only thing left to do is replace the dial bulbs; which, is also a pain. This set uses two type 49 bulbs. One illuminates the radio dial and the other one illuminates the clock face. Guess which bulb is burned out? Since this radio is so difficult to work on, I'm going to replace both bulbs while I'm in there. It seems that they would have used a longer lasting neon bulb to illuminate the clock face.

Once I put it back together, I'll post a picture of the finished product. I'm not much into solid state table radios; but, this one is actually a cute radio.

I have a larger solid state GE clock radio and a solid state Motorola clock radio, both from '63. It seems that AC only solid state table radios didn't really take off until around '66 and these earlier ones seem to be harder to find.

[Chad Hauris]

I remember getting one of these on a vacation trip with my parents when I was a teenager. I couldn't pick up many stations though. Maybe they didn't have high-voltage audio output transistors at that time and had to use the power transformer to get low voltage because of that.

[radiotvnut]

Here it is back together. For some reason, the dial lights still do not work. From what I can tell, it's not getting any voltage from the chassis to the bulbs; but, this thing is such a ***** to get apart that I really don't want to take it apart again just to fix the dial lights. One day, if I decide to open it back up, I may replace the bulbs with LED's.

[bgadow]

I had a pair of those when I was a teenager. I don't remember either one working all that great. Back then I was totally worthless at fixing anything and do remember struggling with taking one apart. GE had the same idea you did-I know at least one of them used neon bulbs. A couple years ago I found another one but haven't done a thing with it yet. There is a print ad for this model where they brag about the compact size.