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Making Money
in Radio |
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This is one of thousands of advertisements in various
magazines that spanned more than six decades. It is an ad
for a National Radio
Institute (NRI) correspondence course. Notice
the date. In 1931 a radio in your home was a luxury. A radio
connected our grandparents to the world. Television was
science fiction. The Internet was beyond science
fiction, never predicted, not even by Arthur C. Clarke.
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When
the radio broke, the link to the outside world was lost.
Why? Because you only had ONE. As a matter of fact, in 1931
only 45% of households in the USA had a radio. It was a
major investment and it had to be repaired. Who was going to
repair it? YOU WERE! You were going to get BIG PAY in the
radio industry.
After World War II the price of a radio
dropped to the point where you could have "a radio in every
room." Bakelite table radios were relatively inexpensive,
and by 1948 85% of households owned a radio of some sort.
More radios meant more broken radios. You could make money
in radio repair and get "Big Pay" in some ambiguous "radio
job" as the ad stated. Can you still do it today? |
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1948 NRI
advertisement. According to their claims, you could make
from $3,000 to $7,500 a year in radio and have a nice car
and house. An NRI ad implied your wife wouldn't be happy
unless you took the course and made more money, like "Bill"
did. Do you want your wife to leave you for Bill? Better
take the course!
Other ads showed you being bypassed for a promotion. In the 1960s,
an RCA course showed an Atlas missile being launched while
"you" sat at the controls but "you" were a silhouette, so
every person seeing it could put himself at the controls.
There were ads from the National Radio
Institute, Capitol Radio Engineering Institute, National
Schools, Sprayberry Academy Of Radio, Cleveland Institute Of
Radio Electronics, Coyne Electrical School and DeForest
Training, Inc. They all promised to make you a radio expert,
and if you devoted your spare time to the courses, you DID
become one.
In 1987 I found the books from an NRI radio course
stacked up in the basement of a house we had just bought. I
decided to take the course and build the cool radio that was
part of the training. NRI no longer offered the radio
course, so I took the computer course and built the cool
computer that was part of the training. (I didn't really
care about the course, I just wanted the computer.)
It worked, as
advertised! I've been working with computers ever since. I
got a promotion, just like they said I would! The placement
test for the new job was on logic gates and I had just
finished the chapter on logic gates the week before I took
the test. We got a nice house and new cars and my wife
didn't leave me for "Bill". She left me for "Bob" but that's
another story. |
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There are still a few
guys out there who will repair your radio, and a whole bunch
of them who restore them for a hobby. One way to "make money
in radio" is to sell impossibly shiny ones on ebay, like
this one from "oldradiodaze125." People will buy shiny
radios even if they don't work. In this case, the radio was
restored to working condition. And it was shiny. Who
wouldn't want a shiny restored radio from 1940? |
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The radio that was auctioned is a Philco model
PT-2, made in 1940 or 1941.
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During the war all commercial radio production ceased as the
manufacturing facilities of our country were devoted to the
war effort. In 1946 Philco resumed production with the model
46-250 in the same cabinet. They probably had tens of
thousands of the cabinets in storage during the war. They
continued to use this cabinet until 1949.
I wrote to "oldradiodaze125" and asked him how he got it so
shiny. He replied that he had sanded it with "Micro-Mesh"
sanding pads and there was no coating or lacquer on it.
As you can see, it went for $281.90 with shipping. So can
anybody get in on this and "make money in radio?" Let's give
it a try. |
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| I bought this on ebay for
$43.92 with shipping. These pictures are from the auction. It is not
a PT-2. It's a 46-250, made after the war. |
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The
chassis was filthy. Where WAS this?? Whose house is so dirty
the inside of their radio looks like this? Oh well, maybe it
was in an attic for 20 years. It had no power cord, the
antenna was detached from the case and I had to blow it out
with a leaf blower before it came into the house.
I decided NOT to restore it, just clean it up, add a new
power cord, make the cabinet shiny and resell it. None of
the tubes were tested. Andrea and I were very surprised when
we turned it on and it WORKED. It actually worked quite
well, except for a hum. |
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| After cleaning. |
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The first step
in cleaning the cabinet was to soak the knobs
overnight. I don't like touching skanky radio knobs,
especially when I don't know what plague infected,
virus laden, sore covered degenerate touched them
last.* These pictures make me a bit peckish for some
miniature peanut butter cups!
(* No offense to the ebay seller.
Just a joke!)
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| I spent $10.00 on the Micro
Mesh sanding pads and $8.00 on some decals for the front. The cost
was now up to $61.92. |
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Here it is, cleaned and polished. I
spent about six hours on it. Now it was time to ebay it. |
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Here are some of the
pictures from the ebay auction. I was very honest in the
description and stated that except for the power cord,
the radio chassis was UN-RESTORED and there was a hum due to
the age of the filter capacitor. (A strong station would
drown out the hum but I didn't mention that in the
description.)
These photos don't seem to be as nice as the ones at the top
of the page, from "oldradiodaze125." I wasn't able to
achieve that look, and the radio was never that shiny even
brand new, out of the box. My pictures were a very close
match to what the actual radio looks like. |
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On
September 4, 2016 the radio sold for $152.50 plus $18.00
shipping, or $170.50. So how much did I make? I had $61.92
invested in the radio. I under estimated the shipping by
$10.00, so I had to eat that. Then ebay took a cut of
$17.97. Profit on the sale was $80.61. I put about 8 hours
into it, including driving to the UPS store, so I made
$10.00 an hour.
Keep in mind, this was a 46-250, not a pre-war PT-2. The
46-250 is so common that when we went to the Kutztown Radio
Show in September of 2016 we saw no less than eight of them
there. |
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One thing that
surprised me was the note I got from the buyer, a guy who
lives in California.
Dear Mr. Simpson,
The radio is arrived today with no damage. It work just
fine. Thanks so lot for your nice packing.
My parents used have such a unit back to late 1940s when I
was a kid.
This unit brought back lot of memories to me.
Thanks again.
Ron
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| So how do you like
that? A guy bought it to LISTEN to it! He's almost as old as
the radio! I figured some hobbyist would want it to restore
it. If I had known some 70 year old guy wanted the radio to
LISTEN to it, I would have replaced that filter capacitor so
the radio didn't have a hum. As a matter of fact, I would
have just given him the darn thing for free, to make the old
guy happy. |
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Now
we come to a twist in the story. On the day I posted the
above on facebook, an ebay user with a new account and no
feedback began to bid on the radio. The price began to shoot
up. I wasn't sure if somebody was "helping" me, so I went
back on facebook and told them to stop but they didn't.
We were all new on ebay at one time. Was this legitimate? Did
someone join ebay just to get this radio? Hey, it could have
been the old guy's son bidding against his father because he
wanted to give him a birthday present. Who knows?
The "make big money in radio" experiment now had an unknown
variable. I would have to start over. I needed another radio
to shine up, and this time, I wouldn't mention it on
facebook.
Some time in 1988 my brother Chris gave me a box of radios he
found in the trash. At the time, he was in college and
driving a delivery truck For "Coventry Market" on the side.
He said he found the box on Rhawn Street in the Fox Chase
section of Philadelphia. It was time to open the box, grab a
radio and shine it up. |
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