1939 Philco Model 39-35 Radio Repair Journal
by Chad Hauris, Retro Electronics and Audio Lab, Midland, TX. 9/3/06

This 1939 Philco was in fairly good condition except for really BAD wiring. This radio has all rubber insulated wires which were completely disintegrated. It had received a repair job sometime in the late 1980's which was just a patch-up job with a few new caps. Not the way we do it here! This radio received all new wiring and mylar and electrolytic capacitors.

Philco 39-35 chassis before repairs.
Chassis before repairs. All of this wiring was bad! You can see where a few new caps were patched in by someone in the 1980's.

Bad wiring in Philco power transformer.
Bad wiring in the power transformer.

Repairing the Philco 39-35 power transformer.
Disassembled power transformer. The old wiring was re-insulated with heat shrink tubing.

Repairing the Philco IF transformer.
Repairing the IF transformer wiring. I used heat shrink tubing on this one,  but for the other one I found that I could just as easily attach new wires.

Rewired Philco 39-35 radio.
Re-wired Philco 39-35. All wires were replaced except for a few wires going to the tuning capacitor which were the cloth-covered type and still looked OK. The power supply wiring and fuse holder was organized better with a cable clamp after this test.

Testing the Philco 39-35.
Testing the Philco 39-35. We aligned the AM and Shortwave bands with the


Philco 39-35 dial lamp.
We installed a dial lamp...a 12 volt bulb was installed to prevent overheating the dial plastic scale.

Testing the Philco 39-35 in the cabinet.
Testing the Philco 39-35 in the cabinet. A new wiring harness was made up for the field coil speaker. The holes contain coil and capacitor adjustments for the preset buttons. The preset system works very well and we set up the buttons for local stations.

Philco 39-35 front view.
Front view, testing.

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