Grundig 955-W3D
- sinbadcarey
- Aug 29
- 1 min read
Arrived in fair cosmetic condition, given it's age but makes a loud BRRRR noise when powered on.
Initial visual inspection shows:
Mains cord frayed
Back to cabinet warped
Internal chassis corroded and needs a clean
Tuning dial not moving correctly.
Makes a loud BRRRR noise when powered on
I’ve completed the repair and restoration! Hopefully this radio will continue working for many years to come. The final tests I did were to create a local station for MW and LW and confirm FM is able to pick up stations. One thing I am puzzled by is that the built in FM antenna is very poor. It works best with just one one wire in the FM socket. The rear backboard is flat again, after being squashed flat under a pile of tiles, but best of all is that it’s sounds really lovely, nice and warm and easy on the ear!
You can watch a demo video of it here..
I gave it a lot of thought about how to fix the broken lug issue. Ideally, I would order a new part, but that’s not an option. I decided I could either drill a small hole and fix a tiny screw in place, or I could carve a new lug from the remaining plastic. I decided to carve a new lug, which worked fine. I used a 0.7mm drill bit and carefully drilled and smoothed it out. I think the screw option would have been neater, but carving a new lug was quick and easy. At the same time I was able to find the two vanes that were deformed slightly and causing the short in the capacitor. After rebuilding…
During a final test I discovered all was not well! When tuning MW or LW, about a third of the way down the dial, there’s a massive loud crackling and the tuner stops working. It happens at exactly the same position though. Suspecting the variable tuning capacitor has an issue, I start testing. As suspected the capacitor shorts when turned to a specific spot so start checking for debris or a deformed vane. I have to take the radio chassis out again to do this, and unfortunately when removing the tuning string, a tiny plastic lug that the string hooks around in the wheel used to turn the capacitor gets broken. In the pictures below you can see the variable…
With the radio now working I can turn my attention to giving the case and controls a good clean. In particular I'd like to try and give the speaker grill cloth a clean, so after separating the speaker off, I
used a small amount of carpet cleaner and water. This was risky as it can cause the cloth to shrink so dried the cloth quickly to mitigate this. I think it helped a bit. The case had a liberal clean with foam cleaner and then the glass tuning dial and buttons and knobs, along with a new card back. Finally, I gave the case a polish to bring a shine back to the Bakelite.
With the radio working, I listen to the audio and notice it is distorted, a common cause apparently is the ratio detector electrolytic capacitor in the FM detector failing, so replace it and the audio improves. Given the number of failed capacitor I decide to change all electrolytic and paper/wax capacitors, which takes some time but when done the sound is much improved further