A Zenith Royal 66 AM Receiver

Here's an antique from the earliest days of the transistor radio.

It's so old, it has a bulky air-dielectric tuning capacitor in it, rather than a modern, miniature film-dielectric tuning capacitor. Here's a rear view of its innards.

It's quite dead. I'll check the battery cells and their contacts.

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All four cells were totally discharged. The unit must have been left turned on and neglected. New cells got it going, and it works nicely. The volume control is noiseless. There's a bit of noise at the very low end of the tuner's reach.

The battery compartment contacts are excellent -- clean and free of oxidation. Zenith knew what they were doing.

 The only real flaw was a loose tuning dial numbers ring. Some CA adhesive took care of that.

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It Was A Different Time

The battery compartment map on the inside of the rear cover gives instruction for the installation of mercury cells.

Mercury cells have been virtually banned for a long time now, because of their toxic contents.

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So there we are -- a working radio set, probably from the 1950s, back when we used to manufacture consumer goods in North America.

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