Philips Philetta.
Here is my compact Philips Philetta B3D32A otherwise known as the Philetta de luxe. Around '63.
I imported it from German ebay, obviously a pretty hard to find set in the UK. In terms of electronics there wasn't a great deal to get it working, just a new ECL86. I changed a few capacitors. The main smoothing caps had been replaced but left a little untidy.
The main and time consuming work was on the cabinet. The original finish (almost certainly nitro) had multiple extreme long cracks, as though someone had scored the entire cabinet with a sharp Stanley knife. Those types of cracks are fairly common with nitro of the period, it's a brittle hard finish and the heat from the valves wouldn't have helped. I decided to strip it. In the end I re-veneered the whole cabinet with American Black Walnut and finished it in shellac - actually seed-lac, which is a fairly raw form of shellac. It gives much more colour than something like button. I added a red tint to give the walnut a much warmer hue. it doesn't quite come across on the picture but it's more like a deep reddish mahogany.
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