[Jayce]

Still keeping my fingers crossed, but it appears I have finally ironed out the issues with my recapped Arvin 302. My late friend recapped this radio the winter before he passed away, but we never really could get it to pick up much at all here at my place. It was one of those projects we were going to get back to, but other radios got worked on before it and he passed away of course. Well, finally figured out the poor reception issue, one of the wires to the tuner was broke off! In this model they mounted the tuner remotely from the chassis with stupidly short wires, in fact the one that broke off goes right over one of the tuning adjustments. I figure my friend did a final tweaking of the alignment and the old wire cracked right at the solder joint, then finally broke totally after I got it home. Well, that is repaired and... then it would get badly distorted sound after 15 minutes! Grrrrr!   Seems even though the 50L6 tests good, it must develop a short after it gets really hot. I subbed another known good 50L6 and the radio is now happy. Playing it right now and hope to use it to welcome in the new year tonight. It's picking up 960 out of Wooster, Ohio on only about five foot of antenna.  

   

[OldRestorer]

LOVE!!!

I bought one if them off eBay cheap but it was missing the tone arm. I received it and ralized the platter was wrong too. 
 have been searching for a junker with no luck. Lat week a friend messaged me and said he has a junker for me. I looked at the pictures and it is not a junker to me. So now I have a black complete one and a white one that needs the tone arm and platter, lol...


I may need you during restoration.. Did you replace the cart? rebuild? Nothing yet?
I was going to counter balance an EV-88 flip cart..

[Jayce]

The 302 uses a magnetic cartridge and mine still works, though might need a rebuild sometime in the near future. Sort of starts to cut out halfway through a record. Either that or I have a shorted wire in the tone-arm pivot.. Hmmm.... I need to get a proper older record to try on it rather than the battered Decca record I got with it. Time to dig out the Victrola records!

[Jayce]

Ok, delved into the tonearm issue on the Arvin today and one problem became very evident after I unwrapped some rather old electrical tape from the pick-up wires. Eeek!

   

The unit had just enough excess wire that I was able to carefully cut our the bad sections and resplice the original wires. That done, I still had odd cutting out on the sound. Dropped the pick-up out of the arm and after peeling off what appeared to be original insulation tape from the connections (ancient medical tape!), found that one connection was definitely loose and had gotten a cold solder joint. Actually, the solder connections were horrible and looked factory, so I redid them both as best I could. Of course I put new electrical tape over them. Now the phonograph seems to play good again with no noticeable cutting out. The horseshoe magnet in there seems pretty strong yet.

[Arran]

Kirk, Jayce;
  Magnetic pickups tend to be the more reliable of the vintage ones, about the only things that fail are the rubber parts and the magnets getting weak, both are repairable. The Rochelle salt crystal cartridges are the worst, those seem to have an 80% or worse failure rate. As for the turntable platter and the tone arm there were only so many companies that manufactured generic ones, General Industries was one of the big ones for producing single speed generic record player parts, and record cutters, if Arvin used these parts someone else did too.
Regards
Arran