Long post, but it may help those who like to restore 'boatanchors'....
First of all, get your stones out: I love Lafayette radios. I have a LOT. Why? Like I said before, they were the 'best bang for the buck' when I was a teenager, back in the stone age. ha ha.
Like my previous review stated, I have had a bunch of these radios and they all "drew a partial vacuum with their lips"....
However, recently I purchased a HA-350 from a chap here in Florida. He was not a Ham, but acquired the radio with a bunch of Hi-Fi gear he bought. He had no idea what it was or how to test it. Looking carefully at the photos, revealed a VERY nice radio, with a thick layer of dust. I hoped, because these things rust like a '59 Plymouth!
Anyway, when the radio arrived (packed excellently), I was kinda surprized at how good it looked. Thankfully, the dust was just that, dust,with NO sign of rust.
I gave the radio a through visual inspection. It had all the original tubes and no one had touched the alignment slugs, trimmers, and coils.
All tubes tested good. The radio worked and received fair.
Before I started the cosmetic restoration, I checked the caps. This is my starting point with ANY radio or piece of Test Equipment.
I won't bore you with the details, but the ONLY caps that passed, were the PS Electrolytics. This was kind of strange, but ya never know....
These 'bad' caps were the Coupling and Bypass caps. All the disc ceramics, dogbones, and postage stamp micas, were fine.
Yep, the radio was vastly improved.
Running through the alignment, yielded the usual results, some adjustments were spot on, others were off to various degrees....
The radio cleaned up perfectly. It looks better thsan the day it left Japan.
How's it work? Pretty good. I was quite surprised! I have another in my collection that looks like it came from a barn, and a leaky one at that!! ha ha
Yes, the 2KHz selectivity is tight. I experimented with different mods for the audio and IF filtering, but the efforts were not worth it. I WAS going to remove the mechanical filter assy, and replace it with a 9 pin socket. Why? That way, I could plug in various filters from my Collins 75A-4 ( I have a lot of spares ). Then I thought, each filter is worth MORE than this whole radio!!! ha ha
Using this fine 350, I went back to my 'arf-arf' 350 and did some internal examining and measurements. Seems the previous owner had replaced a LOT of parts in the crummy 350, and his workmanship was terrible. Replacing them and another alignment brought the old 350 'almost' to the new 350.
Is it 'state of the art'? Heck, NO!!
But a fresh coat of Lafayette blue/green (whatever), and 8 hours of labor has transformed this old girl into a mint, sparkling beauty, that works, pretty good.
You people may be tired of hearing this, but...
As I am typing this, I have my SX-117A playing next to me. See my reviews of that model.
Today, I installed an internal, self powered cooling fan, rather than having it run off of a 'wall wart'. All I can say, it that Ray Osterwald is a fantastic Engineer! This is fast becoming my favorite tube receiver, and believe me, I have a LOT!!!
tnx fer the time
ron
N4UE
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Earlier 1-star review posted by N4UE on 2002-08-28
I'm going to be generous and give this radio a 1. Bring on the hate mail, but honestly, it's that bad.
I guess I've come a long way from my novice days. My first receiver was a Hallicrafter S-120 (woof woof). I upgraded to a Lafayette HE-80 (another review). I can remember lusting after the HA-350. I thought it would be a killer receiver.
Late last year I was able to get 3 or 4 of these (I'm trying to forget), and try them out.
1. Appearance. These were made by Kenwood / Trio. The wiring was quite nice and if you have a mint radio the chassis appears nice and bright (gold di Chromate ?). However, they appear to corrode very easily. I never cared for 'green' radios and that includes Heath. However, Lafayette, did use that nice 'pebble' finish. It hid the scratches well. Evidently, the main tuning knob is highly desirable, as 2 of the 3 I had, had non orignal main knobs. I have also seen some (same radios?) on E-Bay, the same way.
2, Performance. Although this radio has 12 (??) tubes, I'm not sure what they are all there for. Above 14 Mhz, these radios were as deaf as a rock. On all the examples I had, you could barely hear the calibrator signal on the higher bands. I treaked the IF stages and it made little improvement. Maybe in the radio's defense, I should have checked all the bypass and coupling caps. The Main tuning knob has some gear reduction, but it is still waaaay too fast. This makes tuning in SSB difficult (if you can hear then at all).
Osterman rates it: 1 star, $55-95.
All in all..... not much. Believe it or not, in spite of this I am looking for a nice one for my boat anchor Museum. I guess I need something to compare all the '5' radios to.
have fun
ron
N4UE |