PYE 47X (AKA Invicta 200B)
 

I felt I needed something to keep me "out of trouble" over the Christmas break so I purchased a little PYE47X bakelite radio that appeared in a local charity shop for the princely sum of £7.50. It looked a wee bit sad for itself but the case was (under all the grime) intact. The plastic window had become loose & was almost opaque, oddly yellow but that was our old friend cigarette smoke/kitchen fumes. It had obviously been repaired at some point in the past but a long time ago. All the waxy's over 0.1uF were leaky/blown up. Most of the resistors were way out of their 20% tolerance as well, oddly there were two 1M's that were 'intermittent', out of circuit they would measure about 1M but if their leads were stressed this figure would drop to about 200K! Most odd. The valve line up was standard apart from the output valve, this was supposed to be a 35L6GT, in this one there was a 50L6GT, same valve but different filament voltage. After the usual clearing out of the accumulated dust/dirt/spider remains & cobwebs it was looking fairly ok. This set differs from most in that it uses inductive tuning & reflex IF rather than capacitive to receive different stations, quite a novelty in some ways. After application of switch cleaner to the volume pot & wave change switch it was time to apply some power. This, for me at least, is always a nerve wracking moment! It doesn't seem to matter how many times I check I ALWAYS check again, just to make sure. As this is an AC/DC set I decided to use the lamp limiter, all appeared well initially. After about 30 seconds or so there was a feint sign of noise from the speaker, with an aerial attached it successfully pulled in a few local MW stations. Then I notices smoke! Heck! Where was that coming from? And why did it smell of talcum powder?!? It was, of course, the dropper burning off years of accumulated dust & moisture. Over several cooling/heating cycles this has now stopped but that dropper gets mighty hot. As to where the set will go now I have no idea, no doubt a place will show itself, eventually.........

Re: PYE 47X (AKA Invicta 200B)
 

That's a nice find! I've never seen one of those before, and I like the look of it.

What did you do about the output valve – did you have a spare 35L6GT?

Re: PYE 47X (AKA Invicta 200B)
 

I thought as it was a higher voltage it wouldn't do any harm to fire it up as was. Even though the heater chain required an extra 15 volts it seems to work ok. I may well return to it at some point but I have another set on the go, this will be a long term one as there is little to no information about it on this forum or on Paul's excellent DVD-ROM. It does have a certain charm to it, even though it was probably in the "cheap & cheerful" end of the radio market at the time. Dates found inside were from September 1947, I realise that is just an indicator rather than an absolute time but it's done well to survive this long, obviously cared for over the years.