[MurphyNut]

I’ve always liked the neat compact styling of this radio, it dates from 1948 and I guess it was one of those “second sets” manufactures were encouraging the public to buy. Probably destine more for the bedroom or kitchen rather than the living room where a more expensive and larger set would have had pride of space.
I had owned this set many years so I felt it was time to bring it back to life. The first step was to replace all the capacitors this was straight forward apart from the smoothing capacitor 16 + 16 uf. This had a poor reading so I decided to remove the contents of the can and put the new ones inside. A good reason to do this was due to lack of space in the cabinet. This capacitor is neatly mounted on a bracket on the rear of the loudspeaker separate from the chassis
This got the radios working really well; I’m often disappointed with the sound from small Bakelite sets, they look pretty but harsh in tone. This one is much better than the average and pleasant to listen to. I think in part due to the speaker being screwed to the inside of the cabinet rather than mounted on the chassis and pushed up to the speaker aperture.
The next job was to sort out the very faded tuning scale. This is actually printed onto a Bakelite panel about 2mm thick. The black printed text /images were good but the red (MW) had faded so much it was almost illegible, the green (LW) wasn’t too bad.
Luckily this panel was easily removed, just held in place by 3 screws. I simply scanned the scale and imported the image into Microsoft paint. I zoomed in on the type and replaced the faint lettering with newly typed out station names. As my spelling isn’t fantastic I made a note of each station name before I blanked it out and superimposed the new text over the top. I found a typeface close to the original.
After doing all the red the green type didn’t match as well as I hoped so I redid this as well, one last thing I did was import the new image into a program to adjust the overall colour cast; it just needed to look a bit aged so it was yellowed a little.
I printed it onto a good quality “photo gloss” paper and simply placed over the top of the original panel. As this paper is thick, more like card it sits very well in place held in place by those 3 screws.
I’m very pleased with the result, it doesn’t look new and I feel it would pass as the original that had survived in good condition.
This problem of the faded tuning scale seems to be common with this model. So if anyone has this issue with their set I can print off one for you.