[Robert Darwent]

Almost a year ago now, I was fortunate enough to find locally an empty walnut brown Ekco A22 bakelite case. It was in excellent condition, no scratches or cracks, and I immediately bought it. Since then I have been on the look out for an A22 chassis or a set with a damaged case that I could pick up at hopefully a much reduced price and combine. For several months that looked very unlikely to happen and I did serious work instead on using the parts from an Ekco A23 chassis to construct a reproduction A22 chassis to fit my empty case. Then unexpectedly the real thing turned up!

I collected the set in person. The seller told me that when he had purchased the set himself it had been damaged whilst being delivered and he had repaired the resulting broken case with Araldite. Apparently he had also "comprehensively overhauled" the chassis and it was in "superb working order". A quick look at the damage to the case, as I was loading the set into my car, showed it to be not as bad as I had first assumed and I thought I could much improve on the copious amounts of Araldite. But since I had always intended to transfer the chassis to my unblemished case it was not a real issue. The set also had a rough replacement for a back cover, the original having gone missing at some point.

Upon getting the set home I plugged it in to try out. After a bit of a warm-up MW brought in the local station loud and clear even without an aerial connected, but little else. The addition of a few metres of wire as a temporary antenna and MW was much more lively. SW too was very good with stations all over the dial. But LW was just background hiss, even Radio 4 was absent!

At this point I unplugged the set and removed the back cover. What a sight! Virtually the entire chassis had been 'daubed' with black paint. Not even decent black paint at that, more like hardened black treacle! I removed the chassis and was again shocked. The state of the wiring was terrible! Some had obviously been renewed by modern red and orange, but most was original, hard, brittle and flaking, showing exposed wire. If I'd have known this before hand I would never applied power. So much for the comprehensive overhaul! I was really surprised the set worked as well as it did in this condition.

Further investigation showed the 'overhaul' to have included replacement of all but one of the wax capacitors with apparently whatever type and value was to hand at the time! Several resistors had been changed as well, again seemingly with whatever was to hand, with one crudely joined in series to make up the value. But the 'new' wiring really was something! A screening braid had been made from what I assume was the outer layer of a piece of co-axial cable. I'll leave the 'before' and 'after' images to speak for themselves!