Back in early September I found a large collection of electronics in Outremont and brought them to my friend’s shed for storage. This week has been mostly slow so far, partly because I took Monday and Tuesday morning off, so I figured it would be a good opportunity to show you what I saved.
First off is this beautiful old radio. I figure it’s a vacuum tube system which was pretty common in the 1930s-1950s. I can’t remember the brand name and I have a hard time making it out from the photo due to the odd writing style. Regardless, it actually works fairly well. I thought it didn’t work at first but it seems that the radio just takes half a minute or so to get “warm.” It doesn’t get as many stations as a modern machine but an antenna could help with that.
I have to figure out what brand it is before I can tell what it’s worth, but I imagine I should be able to sell this for at least 50$. It’s a pretty classic, collectible design.
I found four different reel-to-reel audio players / recorders. Two of them, the Wollensak 3m below and the Grundig TK-23 above seem to work fine. If so they are worth around 40-50$ each. The others seem to only partially work (as in they’ll fast forward but not play). It’s possible though that I just don’t know how to use them.
Fortunately I have a tonne of audio reels to play around with! I’m lucky my friend with a car (and storage) helped me as otherwise I wouldn’t have had the space or ability to take all this stuff, especially these boxes full of old reels and cassettes.
Some of the reels are marked as being classical music but most don’t give any hints as to what’s inside. There are lots of blank, unopened cassettes and also some pre-recorded music by Greek musicians.
Last but not least is this tower of electronics. Not all of it works, with the bottom Beta player and the top 8-track player having obvious issues. The rest, a bunch of receivers and a cassette player, passed the basic tests by turning on and looking good doing so. It’s hard to test them further without some speakers to connect them to. The best pieces of this bunch are the Clairtone receiver (2nd from bottom) and the Nikko cassette player (3rd from top) which could be worth maybe 80 buck and 100 bucks respectively, assuming they work of course, based on what I see on Ebay.
In the near future I’ll test this stuff further in preparation to sell it. Whatever doesn’t work I’ll put on the Craigslist “free” section.
I have this evening off (though, if any Montrealers know of a Wednesday evening trash pickup let me know!) but I hope to make some more good finds tomorrow morning in either Outremont or Rosemont. As usual I’ll let you know where it goes.
i think you have done very well.
I used to have a couple of friends, and also once saw a show on t.v. to this effect, who all said that those older electronics/towers, would give the “discerning” ear a much better quality sound and tone. They not only safely guarded their older stuff, but actively looked for more to add/persons to help fix stuff.
maybe you have a good deal for yourself here, or maybe if you are lucky, you can find one of those kind of folks looking for this.
We have a lot of radios but were never lucky enough to have found one. Jealous or what.
That’s an old shortwave ham radio http://www.hamuniverse.com/shortwave.html & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortwave_radio & http://support.radioshack.com/support_tutorials/communications/swave-6.htm Pretty cool find!
There could be some really interesting stuff on those old reel-to-reel tapes … a good project for a stormy winter day. 🙂
I think the name on the old radio is Copland
I found two great metal filing cabinets in St.Henri on the pavement on garbage pickup morning earlier this week.I was still a kilometer away from home in walking distance and I do not have a car.So I did not take them home.Still I did drag them from behind heaps of big black garbage bags and displayed them in a prominent spot.I hope someone took them before the garbage truck came.What a waste of metal!Do you rescue and/or help repurpose discarded filing cabinets and plastic milk crates?I hope you do.
I’d say the radio is from the fifties, the style is right, and FM didn’t really start going anywhere much until the late fifties. I missed from the picture that it was shortwave. It likely doesn’t have a lot of value. It’s not a “communication receiver”, it’s a consumer radio that happens to have a shortwave band or two. Someone may collect it, but for the style or because they actually want that brand of radio. I can’t figure out the brand, a few guesses show no hits; I think it’s North American, it doesn’t look like there’s a longwave band on it, which was used a fair amount in Europe back then, and I don’t think FM took off so early in Europe. The name means nothing to me, it may have been a house brand for some department store chain.
One of the problems is the size. Someone needs space for it, and if it’s being shipped, it will be expensive. There’s a limited market within any given area. Radio Hovsep on Park Avenue about mid-block above Bernard services that sort of radio, may have that general type in the window. Maybe he could give some pointers to where the local old radio collectors might be found. He might be interested in the old tape recorders, but I don’t know.
All tube radios take time to warm up, the tubes can’t work until the filaments have reached a certain temperature.
Michael
For the next five or six days,the daytime temperatures will get until 20 degrees or slightly below.Then temperatures will go down significantly.Please visit far-off areas this month;you will have four or five months to check out trash in Mile End,the Plateau,Villeray and Outremont.Go far.
Tried some combinations and came up with Goplana for the brand name. Made in Poland mid 60’s.
I think you got it, thanks!