Recreating an
Alfred P. Morgan crystal set
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Another view of the base. It's a wreck. Lord knows
what all the holes are from. |
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The original plan was to gather
all the old parts together, then remove the parts on the base. The
parts would be cleaned and polished, then the wooden base would be
restored by filling in the holes and sanding it.
In these pictures
you can see the holes from where the radio was upgraded to a transistor
detector. In the left picture, the letters C B
E can faintly be seen, as well as some dings from the Fahnestock clips. In the right
picture you can see where the battery had been connected. A
screwdriver was used to press "minus" and "plus" into the wood. |
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The front has evidence my dad ripped a piece of wood lengthwise to get the dimensions
I wanted. For some reason I used the "bad" side for the front. The
other side is perfectly smooth. The corners are all bashed in and
rounded from 49 years of being moved from place to place.
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Underside of the base with various scribbling,
including some dates. |
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Then Andrea told me I couldn't take the old
radio base apart. She said it was a part of history, so she made me a new base with perfect angles and sharp corners. I
left the old base alone and used a combination of new and original
parts to build a duplicate radio. The new base is the same size as
the old; 7.5" X 3.5". |
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The new radio and a pair of Trimm Professionals. The
headphones are rated at 4000 ohms. |
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In 1966 it
looked more like this. A crystal earplug was used. I don't know if these things
existed when Alfred Morgan wrote the series on radio and
electronics. All the drawings show headphones. A "radio guy" may
tell you the radio shouldn't work with a crystal earplug unless you
put a resistor across the phone connections, but the resistor wasn't
needed in 1966. Back then, the crystal earplug had an actual
Rochelle Salt crystal inside. Today they contain a piezo-electric
disc. |
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I had
absolutely no way of acquiring a pair of headphones in 1966, but a
few years later I met a guy named Joe Jones who GAVE me a pair. Eventually
I bought a pair of Trimm Dependables in 1985 from Modern Radio Labs.
MRL is still in business, but these types of high impedance
headphones are no longer made. I got the Trimm Professionals from
Scotts Crystal Radios. |
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So how well does the radio
work? Um... it works. Not that well in Upper Gwynedd, PA, but I
remember it working better when we lived in Philadelphia. I
spent many hours listening to WIBG 99 on it. Some of the songs
released in 1966 are still my favorites. Good Vibrations,
Sunshine Superman, Summer In The City, Black Is Black, Cherish,
etc., etc.
There
is no way to adjust the selectivity, so sometimes you get two
stations at once. I'm not sure how far down on the AM dial it
tunes. WFIL, AM 560 is the lowest station around here, and I
didn't hear it at all. I don't recommend building one of
these. There are hundreds of better circuits out there. |
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Trying to coax more signal into the set using an
antenna tuner. It didn't help.
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An important note about the crystal earplug |
Buy your crystal earplug from a reputable
dealer; Mike Peebles, The Crystal Set Society, or Modern Radio Labs. Of the three brand
new earplugs I
bought on ebay, two were stone dead and the third had horrendous audio quality.
That means my small sample had a 100% failure rate.
These three earplugs were marked "TAIWAN", but I suspect they were
actually counterfeits made in Red China. Perhaps they're not even
counterfeit, but if they were outsourced they shouldn't have
"TAIWAN" molded into them.
If the earplug
I used in 1966 was one of these counterfeits, I might not have heard anything from
the radio. That would have been a lot of work for nothing. Heed this
warning, don't buy your earplug on ebay. |
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