Refinishing the case was very straight forward. Prime, paint and rub out the finish. The finished radio is a Krylon maroon gloss. The grill is black gloss. The dial glass went together with superglue.
Ebay Listing Picture
The real trick was the electronic restoration. This radio utilized what are known as K-trans IF transformers. I didn't know it, but these things have built-in mica capacitors that migrate silver over the years and short out. The result was that after a full recap and a lot of voltage checking and hair pulling, all I could get was static and nothing but static. A fellow restorer mentioned that my problem might be these caps and it sure was. I went through a lot in replacing these caps and in the process broke one of the hair-fine wire from one of the coils. Below is a close-up of the guts of one of the transformers a fellow restorer posted to help me out. The caps are located in the plastic base. Once I got them replaced, the radio worked really well.
Ktrans transformer
This is the finished radio. Not original, but now more visually interesting.
This was my first bakelite repaint job, but I've done a couple of others since. They can be found here.
