The Magic of Radio Part II: The Autopsy

I don't recall what brand or even what breed that old brown radio was sitting on a dusty shelf at the Goodwill, but I knew I just had to have it. In-between saving my lunch money for an after school pizza and root beer now and then, I managed to pocket four and a half bucks for the privilege of dissecting about the only thing left I hadn't gotten into as a twelve-year-old.

In the name of science we had made mock cherry bombs from the little glass bottles mom got pharmaceutical samples in when she was an RN, and stuffed them with torn off match heads and detonated with a piece of cannon fuse acquired from an advertisement in the back of Popular Science magazine. I created a home-made arc welder from the carbon rods torn out of "D" size batteries and attached to an AC lamp cord via tin can lids floating in a bowl of salt water (which provided a sort of fuse/current limiter when the rods were touched together to make a spark--just before the main house circuit breaker blew).

We even figured out how to make free phone calls across the county by dialing a number and flashing the phone hook to access a circuit called, "Open Line," our own secret internet as you never knew who would be answering at the other end. I had already expended my anatomical curiosity on the skeletal recreation of two rats and a hamster, as well as a botched emergency appendectomy on a friend's guinea pig, so now the innards of this old sacrificial radio was firmly in my sights. It would also be a retribution-free experience since it was excluded from what dad considered "non-experimental home inventory" because I had bought it myself.

As timing would have it the actual procedure wouldn't take place until we returned from Easter Sunday church services. After terrorizing a few of my girl cousins with pseudo-animated rat skeletons, and ate a grand dinner turned out by mom and a couple of aunts, I got down to business.

My bedroom was to be the OR and I left the door open so I could hear the sound of Easter's traditional TV broadcast of The Ten Commandments as background noise. It would hopefully also shield the jackhammer and drill sounds made to the radio while under anesthesia. The radio's AC plug was one of those old Tiffany shade looking numbers with what appeared to be a woven and frayed cotton cord as the conductors, and it was with true adventurer's courage that I plugged it into the wall half expecting a firework display shooting out of the top of the set that was second only to Disneyland. To my surprise the tubes lit-up and within a few seconds I could hear a local broadcast station. Satisfied that this was indeed a good specimen, I unplugged the set and fought the rusty screws holding the metal chassis to the brown Bakelite case until it finally came loose.

Right there in my own two hands I beheld the creation and mystery of electronics. Those dusty but glossy electron tubes, paper wrapped capacitors and shellacked transformers were the result of mankind's greatest achievement and ingenuity, or so I believed. Underneath that monolithic chassis laid a complex of wires and solder terminals the like I had never seen before. Solder joints glistened and caressed the wires that were carefully bent around terminals securing a connection that would last for eternity. Mica capacitors and rectifier diodes adorned the cacophony of wiring creating a complex and living city in my mind. I knew then that the craftsmanship required to assemble such an entity was something I was going to learn, no matter how long it would take.

On the top of the chassis was an amusing and intricate complex of string and pulleys. It reminded me of dad's coat hanger repairs of just about anything that needed fixing around the house. It was the tuning mechanism that rotated a capacitor shaft while at the same time positioned a needle on the dial. Damned clever I thought but that string could be put to better use, such as an extension for my Duncan yo-yo.

The tubes were the first to go into the dissection pile, followed by the yo-yo extension, pulleys and whichever capacitors that was easily removable. Next to be amputated were the transformers, as soon as they cooled down. While pondering the mysterious design of the parts piled on my bed I heard something out of the corner of my ear I hadn't caught before. It was the scene in The Ten Commandments when Moses was working in the mud pits with the old man dying in his arms. The old man said he just wanted to live long enough to see the deliverer. Moses skeptically asked what man could possibly deliver the slaves from bondage. Just then the task master pointed at him and shouted, "You! (pause) Back to work!" Of all the times I've seen that movie I had never connected that line. Sometimes it just pays to listen.

With the transformers, switches and potentiometers detached from the chassis I was now holding the skeletal remains of the radio. I still can't explain why I find satisfaction in taking things apart except for seeing for myself how they work, even if I don't understand exactly why they work. I have always admired that which I can't explain, possibly because I'm always hoping for a day when I can comprehend it. To me, anticipation is a drug of knowledge, something of which I am incurably addicted.

After contemplating the thought and design that went into assembling that pile of parts to make a real working piece of gear I focused my attention to the speaker. Having gained previous (and painful) experience from gutting the family's Hi-Fi console speaker, removal of the shiny copper wire from the voice coil and magnet was a snap. But for all my efforts the only thing that survived the experiment was-the speaker magnet. Magnets are, after all, pretty cool in the classroom.

Cost of experiment? $4.50. Cost of experience? Priceless.

Now if there was only a company that made electronic things that guys like me could actually put back together… perhaps toys made from as far away a place as Benton Harbor, Michigan…

73 to all,

Mike, AI4DH (ex. N6HVP)

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