[jcr1972]

Thanks for the nice replies!

I'm sure I will find this phorum very helpful, especially when I start on the Philco 37-690

@Bill,
It is interesting to see that a vintage danish radio found its way to the USA. I saw that particular Master 38K in the collection from where I bought my 39S. It is a beautiful radio! Mine has the more normal 440kHz IF frequency though.

@Arran,
Sometimes I do the trick you mention, by re-stuffing the old capacitors. In this case I couldn't do it, because those caps I replaced, had already been replaced once, probably in the 50's, with Jensen oilcaps. They become very unreliable with age, so I always replace them. Here we only have the white melt glue. I will be checking on the internet for the brown type, as it will be much easier to get a nice result than with the white one.
Variable bandwith was pretty common over here. Of course not on the cheaper sets, but most, if not all, the better ones had it. Both mechanical and electrical systems where used. On the older sets I think it was always mechanical. I never really got the point in having variable bandwith over here though, as no station at all had a wider bandwith than 9kHz. So a greater fidelity was never possible, but it might have been a good sales argument. I read that in the USA, especially in the 50's, several stations were transmitting with a much wider bandwith, allowing high fidelity receiving on AM. This was never the case over here. I use a sstran transmitter in my house and it uses a wide bandwith, making it possible to receive in a better guality on the sets with variable bandwith.
The side contact bases are calles P-type bases over here. As you mention they where very popular here in the late 30's. In the 40's both 2 and 3 different bases where used at the same time, and in the same radios too. Is the black coating on the canadian tubes a conductive coating too? Here the coating was either red, gold, silver or grey, and it is a conductive layer, making further shielding unnecessary.

Jan