Radiophile.com - Silvertone 8024

Silvertone 8024, 1949

Tube complement: 6BJ6 FM RF, 12AT7 FM mixer/oscillator, 6BE6 AM mixer/oscillator, 6BA6 FM IF, 6BJ6 FM/AM IF, 6T8 detector, 6AS5 audio output, 6X4 rectifier.

This one was unusually difficult to get working. I've found vacuum tubes to be seldom responsible for radio problems; in fact, I've encountered radios from the 1930s with a complete set of original tubes and all the tubes have still been good. In this radio, all eight of the tubes were bad. Some of them had been replaced since the radio was new, and some were the original Silvertone tubes, but all were bad anyway. I notice that this radio, with eight tubes and power transformer packed into a relatively small cabinet, runs hot. No doubt this is the main cause of the short tube life. There was also the usual complement of bad electrolytic and paper capacitors to deal with, and all of the transformer slugs accessible from the top of the chassis were way off alignment. (But the under-chassis slugs were right on. Hmm...) But now it's working, and it sounds like a ... well, a cheap small table radio.