It is a very cheap radio. It has a 4-inch speaker (with a field coil), no dial lamp and no bells or whistles. Its tube line up is 80, 58, 56, 2A3. It had seen some work done to it in the past and it appears that the antenna coil had been replaced at some point. It is mounted above the chassis and you can see where it is soldered onto the speaker frame; I doubt any manufacturer actually designed the radio this way. Also, the antenna transformer's primary was just missing. Someone had also run a mica cap from the grid of the 58 tube to the part of the antenna coil that was still there. Anyway, the radio did not work. I wound a slip-on coil for the antenna primary and now it works OK. I can get maybe 6 stations across the dial if I hold the antenna wire. I haven't tried it with a real antenna.
Electronically, I guess this is about as cheap as you can go with a one-dial tuning set-up. There is the antenna transformer (wound on cardboard and not shielded). It feeds the signal to the RF transformer (which is unshielded and wound on a cardboard tube) which amplifies the signal, passing it from the primary to the secondary. It then goes to the grid of the 56 tube and is converted to an audio frequency. The AF signal is fed to the gid of the 2A5 output tube. The volume control is attached to the antenna primary (one end of the volume control was not connected at all when I got the set). The volume control also controls the cathode bias of the TRF stageThere were a number of companies that I found that made a very similar radio (e.g., Troy, Howard, Gillifan) but only the Westone 20 had the exact same tube line up. I don't want to assume that it necessarily is a Westone as I know there were other small manufacturers that didn't find their way to Riders, but it seems to be the same tube line-up and circuit. The radio probably had a small plate on it somewhere that fell off at some time in the past. There are no paper labels or other identifying marks.
I stripped off the red-painted fabric and found the case was made of simple, thin plywood. I was hoping for a nice veneer that someone had covered years ago, but no luck. Since I had no idea what the original looked like, except that the fabric was probably green, I decided to veneer the little box and do her up right.
Here's the radio after the last coat of lacquer. Too shiny for my taste.
Here's the "done" picture. The finish is rubbed out with rottenstone and mineral oil. It took off the high gloss and left a nice surface. I need to match up some knobs for the set. I have no idea as to which knobs may have been on it originally.
