'68 GE AM/FM clock radio

[radiotvnut]

The other day, a friend called to say that he'd bought me an old '50's tube type radio for $10 at a flea market. I asked him to give me some details and he said, "it says 'solid state' on the front; so, that means it has tubes, right?" I corrected him; but, told him to bring me the radio, anyway. If I turned him down, he might stop looking for me and I will miss something good. And, I appreciate him taking the time to get something he thinks I might want as most people would not do so. Upon opening this one up, it appears to be a '68 model and it's built cheaply; just like any other GE of the day. It's an AM/FM hot chassis model with a Telechron clock that works fairly well on AM; but, is dead on FM. All I've done was clean the controls and that didn't help the FM problem. Maybe I'll dig in it one of these days. Somewhere, I have the dual spaeker non-clock version of this radio that has a broken dial string. Also, I have a similar wooden GE solid state clock radio that uses the same basic chassis design.

[wa2ise]

I've played with GEs like this. Usually the smaller electrolytic coupling and bypass caps dry out and lose capacitance. Also those slide switches on the circuit board get very dirty easily. You may need to clean them more. The transistors usually don't go bad. The fact that you got AM to work means that the audio output and such is working.

[radiotvnut]

Here's the wooden radio that uses a similar chassis. If you look at the chassis photo, you will see just how cheap GE could be. It appears that they simply mounted a cheapy plastic radio inside of a wooden cabinet. Notice the screw at the top that has the plastic bent. Now, that mounting arrangement is some real high class manufacturing.

[DaveWM]

wow that looks like a frankenradio....

Man that is low

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by DaveWM

wow that looks like a frankenradio....

Back around 1971, my father worked for a big insurance company in NYC, and had easy access to a shop that sold off the GE factory reject boards intended for these radios. He got me a bunch, and I was able to get some of them working, and I built a cabinet for one of these.

..

I did modify the FM front end, changing the bipolar RF amp to a MPF102 JFET, to have better dynamic range, which makes for less intermod distortion products across the FM band. The FM band in the NYC area really tests the quality of an FM tuner.

[Reece]

GE used to have a good name and must have been just banking on that when they made that plastic-inside-wood radio. Got twin speakers, big deal: two four-inch speakers sounds like two four-inch speakers. In the same space they could have put a 5 x 7" or 4 x 8" and had better sound with a little more bass but it might have cost fifty cents more and the public probably wouldn't know, anyway, so they got away with it.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by Reece

GE used to have a good name and must have been just banking on that when they made that plastic-inside-wood radio. Got twin speakers...In the same space they could have put a 5 x 7" or 4 x 8" and had better sound with a little more bass ...

The output transformer would need to be bigger for more bass, they used rather small ones in these sets. You can substitute a standard AA5 output transformer in these sets, as the operating conditions (B+, wattage, speaker load) are quite similar. The audio wasn't anything to write home about, but the AM section was pretty good, and the FM not bad once I modified the front end.

GE used to have a good name, but they became evil in the mid 80's...

Bet some consumers thought "dual speaker" = stereo...

[radiotvnut]

GE bought RCA in, IIRC, '86 and soon closed their GE TV plants. Some GE TV's of the mid '80's were rebadged Panasonic and Goldstar. Around '87, GE sold the entire RCA/GE consumer line to Thomson consumer electronics and it was at that time when the GE and RCA names became nothing more than a label. One of the last "real" GE TV's was the "PC" chassis and was probably one of their better efforts. As far as GE quality, it started going down shortly after WWII and some of their tube radios of the '50's and '60's were a major problem with poor quality PC boards and inferior IF transformers, among other things. I once asked a radio repairman what he thought the sorriest radio was and, without hesitation, he answered "GE" in a firm voice.

[HadYourPhil]

We used to call them "Ghastly Electric"!

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by radiotvnut

GE bought RCA in, IIRC, '86 and soon closed their GE TV plants. ...

We didn't call GE's CEO "Neutron Jack" for nothing. Back in the 80's there was talk of building neutron nuclear bombs. These bombs would get rid of the annoying people without damaging the valuable real estate in a war...

[marty59]

Neutron Jack had a way of cutting employees too....

[bgadow]

I've seen a few of those wood-over-plastic GE sets; RCA did it as well, as did Westinghouse as I recall. Japan,Inc. was nipping at their heels so I guess they had to do something. GE was the master at it, though. I've seen some of their cheapest models which I don't think used a single screw in the whole set. All "snap-fit".

[Jeffhs]

Those plastic-in-wood GE radios may have been made that way on purpose -- to fool people into believing they were buying a top-line radio in a wood cabinet. I seriously doubt, however, that the "wood" cabinets were real wood. On the off chance they actually were wood cabinets (not particle board with a woodgrain overlay), I seriously doubt as well that GE put the plastic radio chassis in a cabinet made of expensive, fine wood such as mahogany, cherry, et al. These were obviously cheaply built radios meant to sell at dirt-cheap prices, so I would expect the cabinet to be every bit as cheap as the plastic chassis inside.

[Findm-Keepm]

Originally Posted by radiotvnut

One of the last "real" GE TV's was the "PC" chassis and was probably one of their better efforts. As far as GE quality, it started going down shortly after WWII and some of their tube radios of the '50's and '60's were a major problem with poor quality PC boards and inferior IF transformers, among other things. I once asked a radio repairman what he thought the sorriest radio was and, without hesitation, he answered "GE" in a firm voice.

Agreed - the level of engineering that went into the PC chassis is evident in some of the materials I got from the closed Portsmouth plant. GE did tests on several different PC board materials - I have samples of some labeled "Phenol1 test, Phenol 2 test, etc. They also tried out some of the Hitachi and Sanyo Jungle chips, which they didn't (thankfully) place in their production sets. They were also using Mitsumi tuners, probably the best among all of the varactor tuners out there. That said, they blew it with the PM chassis - too much GE, too little engineering. What they wasted on getting VIR developed probably would have funded a whole lot of better improvements in their sets.
By the mid-1970's, GE was rebadging Crown, Goldstar and Shogyo radios and tape players. If the model number started with a number, it was imported. Their clock radios form the 70's and even into the 80s weren't all that bad. They imported the boards and assembled them in America - the clock radio cases were 100% US made.

Cheers,

[peverett]

I used to have a couple of roundie color TVs from RCA that had fake masonite cases(finished to look like wood) over the metal-cased TV. This was actually pretty good as the metal cases were protected and still looked great when the cheap masonite was thrown away. The chassis were the standard RCA color TV chassis's of the 1960s.