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My grandpa's clock radio still works after I fixed it from youtube
I found this old Panasonic clock radio from the 80s at my grandpa's house last month and the display was totally dead. Found a video from some guy in Ohio who showed me how to replace the capacitors on the board. Took me about an hour with a soldering iron I borrowed from my neighbor and it fired right back up. The sound is still a bit scratchy but I'm thinking the speaker might need some contact cleaner on the inside. Has anyone else tried fixing up old clock radios from that era and had issues with the volume knob crackling?
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the_simon1mo ago
Grandpa's radio is gonna need more than just a YouTube fix for that crackle, huh.
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maxm631mo ago
Honestly, I used to roll my eyes at people who said old radios needed careful handling. I figured, "It's just a box of wires and tubes, how bad can it be?" Then my buddy brought over this 1947 Zenith from his grandpa's attic and I saw the crackle was coming from a capacitor that was literally bulging on one side. A simple YouTube video showed me how to test it with a multimeter and swap it out for a modern film cap, and the difference was night and day. Ngl, I was wrong thinking it was all just noise that could be ignored.
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