Vintage Audio Activities...

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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Bit on radio bit of The Huffy Radio Bike from the mid 1950's

The Huffy Radio Bike- Photos, Service, and History -

The three vacuum tube radio built into the tank was designed and manufactured for Huffy by the Yellow Springs Instrument Company, Ohio. In 1990 Hardy Trollander one of the founders of YSI provided a hand drawn schematic of the radio.
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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

...and this has got to be the most comprehensive souurce on the internet for all things old bike. The pages on the Radio Bike are excellent. The pictures are superb but the two I suspect which may be of greatest interest for the radio element are these

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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by Peter.N. »

That's a clever circuit - a superhet with only three valves. To produce enough audio to hear it on a bike was quite an achievement. The batteries would have been expensive in those days.

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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by Sloppysod »

CitroJim wrote: 05 Sep 2020, 16:12 It still wears its '£5' sticker - what it cost me - as I cannot remove it without damaging the fascia...
Hi Jim, you clever so & so, I remember many failed radio projects (lack of pocket money) from my early years, "Everyday Electronics" was the mag I think.
Anyway Halfrauds sell something called "Sticky Stuff Remover", I have used it on a number of different surfaces without any adverse affects.

No I will go back to reading the rest of the thread........ :wink:
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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by CitroJim »

Wow! That's great detail :) Great to see a full circuit diagram... The radio is a simple superhet for medium wave only. It's clever in only using three valves and using one to do three things, an IF amp, detector and audio preamp :D

The valves are ordinary American 'battery' valves of the period employing 1.5V filaments that could run from a standard dry cell and HT was via a 90V dry battery...

Along the same time there were British battery portable sets employing similar DF, DK and DL series valves, the most famous being those produced by Ever Ready and Vidor - also famous battery makers...

The combined 1.5 and 90v batteries were expensive although long-lasting in the main... I guess the battery makers had a vested interest in making radios as a good market for their batteries ;)

One thing those valves don't contain is mercury :)

The genre of bike is a 'Cruiser' :) I like them a lot as they are most stylish :cool: The Raleigh Chopper is a distant cousin...
Last edited by CitroJim on 28 Dec 2020, 10:55, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by CitroJim »

Peter.N. wrote: 28 Dec 2020, 10:39 That's a clever circuit - a superhet with only three valves. To produce enough audio to hear it on a bike was quite an achievement. The batteries would have been expensive in those days.
Peter, our threads crossed.. Sorry to repeat what you already said again... As you say, a very clever circuit... Shall we call it an AA3 (All-American 3) after the more standard All-American 5?...

The 3V4 output valve was equivalent to the DK94 and good for about 250mW so you'd need good ears and not to much wind to enjoy the programme...

Having a ferrite rod aerial was very cutting-edge at the time!
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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by Peter.N. »

Not to worry Jim - I do it all the time. :) I thought that about the ferrite rod, a frame aerial all round the bike might have been effective - or maybe not it being metal. The other valves presumably would have been DK91 and DF91.

I remember having a little radio on my bike when I was a kid, I can only remember it was called a 'Hermes' cant remember much else about it. I had a 10 volt glass ex WD accumulator in a pannier on my last bike, powering heated handlebars (wound with copper wire) and a very bright front light. :roll:

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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by white exec »

Remember my grandmother and her companion living for some time without a mains electricity supply in a small house in Northfields, Ealing. Their radio - could have been a Cossor - ran from a chunky 90v EverReady dry battery, but the 2v was supplied by a glass (lead-acid) accumulator, which they got recharged for a couple of pence at the local hardware shop.

Although the rented property had a gas supply (which also provided lighting), the landlord refused to have electricity installed for years, but finally relented. My father, I think, did all the internal wiring. Bit hazy about all the detail, as I was only about 6 or 7 at the time.
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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by CitroJim »

Cossor were a famous old make Chris and ceased to exist when Philips took them over in 1957. They were always renowned for their quality 🙂

I have a 1957 Cossor radiogram in my collection. It is truly excellent...

There's a neat connection between those 2v accumulators and bikes... So often the local bike shop charged them for those with no charging facilities of their own. Many bike dealers went on to be radio and TV dealers and it was not unusual to see them run both businesses in parallel 😀
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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

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CitroJim wrote: 28 Dec 2020, 13:16 Cossor were a famous old make Chris and ceased to exist when Philips took them over in 1957. They were always renowned for their quality 🙂

I have a 1957 Cossor radiogram in my collection. It is truly excellent...

There's a neat connection between those 2v accumulators and bikes... So often the local bike shop charged them for those with no charging facilities of their own. Many bike dealers went on to be radio and TV dealers and it was not unusual to see them run both businesses in parallel 😀
Indeed - my grandparents had an accumulator that they took to be charged each weekend at one of the two radio & TV shops. My parents bought our radios and TVs from there and my bikes also came from there - plus an early transistor radio, a 'Micro-Boy' that was in two parts - a 'wandering' part with an earphone (mono) and a static part that the wandering part plugged in to at home, that was power supply and speaker.
Curiously, it was in the same colour scheme as the radio bike and the first thing I thought of when I saw it.

A lot of customers thought I was deaf when they saw the earpiece as they were only used to seeing headphones for listening to radio.
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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

myglaren wrote: 28 Dec 2020, 13:35 ...plus an early transistor radio, a 'Micro-Boy' that was in two parts - a 'wandering' part with an earphone (mono) and a static part that the wandering part plugged in to at home, that was power supply and speaker.
Curiously, it was in the same colour scheme as the radio bike and the first thing I thought of when I saw it.

A lot of customers thought I was deaf when they saw the earpiece as they were only used to seeing headphones for listening to radio.
was it something like this Steve

https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/grundig_m ... r_boy.html

looks like there was a bit of a docking station as you describe

https://www.radiomuseum.org/images/radi ... _17946.jpg


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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by myglaren »

Similar but plainer. Red and white and the dial wasn't elliptical like that.

More like this one:
micro_transistor_boy_59_17947.jpg
Without the legs on the base station and a white front, no gold on it, just red trim and red around the dial.

Same thing, basically.
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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by CitroJim »

That's lovely! Very rare now...

I don't suppose you still have it Steve?
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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

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No, that was sixty years ago, long gone.
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Re: Lockdown Vintage Audio Activities...

Post by white exec »

When I was about 12 (1960), the BBC ran a television programme which featured a build-it-yourself transistor radio, and we sent off for the instruction sheet. It covered MW, ran off a 9v PP3, and output was to a pair of headphones - which had earlier been used on a home-made cat's whisker crystal set.

The most expensive bit of the TR kit was a pair of OC71 transistors, which then cost around £3, and hadn't been in the shops (City Radio, Bond Street, Ealing) very long. All the bits were assembled into a polythene butter dish, under a 3mm paxolin panel, over which the original lid clipped. "Breakthrough" was that the unit only required a 3ft length of thin cable as an aerial - and no ground connection.

It got taken to school (my second year at grammar school), and school prefects on Park Patrol - the splendid Walpole Park adjoined the school - discovered that there were no Rules against lying on the grass and listening to lunchtime radio with a friend, earpieces turned outward, so one each.

I have no idea what happened to the butter-dish radio, but it always worked. It got displaced by a Bush portable radio, which looked rather like a thick version of a car radio, with a bright red control panel, cream/brass knobs, and pale grey casing. This was a lovely thing, and even slotted into the glove compartment of my first car, a 1935 Rover Ten.
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