On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 05:33:12 UTC, "Mr Fed UP"
wrote:

Well not trying to be glib or what ever....

Have you checked around with folks who "collect" older radios?
Some items that collectors balk at buying are items that have been
"refinished".
If your looking to just use it... I gots no advice. But I would check into
the
wisdom of redoing the panel. If the ol' radios are any thing like old items
on
the antiques TV shows, refinishing and refurbishing kill the value of the
antiques.

Good luck 73 Gary

Well that's true but I think the antique road-show people are in a
different reality. ie. They're nuts.

Some of the radio folk might be tending towards that but radios are
nothing like the antiques on TV.

All of that antique stuff is way overpriced. I'm not disputing that
some whack-job collector will pay tens or hundreds of thousands of
dollars for the weird lamp, table, or wooden chicken.

I'm saying that there is no reason for those items to be priced that
high. Especially since a lot of it could be duplicated to a 99.9%
acuracy by a skilled forger or craftsman.

None of the radios that we discuss here have anything like the
valuations of "antiques". If they did, a KWM-2A, "Vietnam
War Antique from the Last Century, Cannot be duplicated, even by
the most skilled craftsman as the parts are no longer made.", would
be priced to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They're not. An M-2A is maybe $1,000-$2,000, Less than the
original price. That era Corvette or Porsche was less than ten
thousand dollars.

If just adjusted for inflation, an M-2A should be ten to twenty
thousand dollars.

If the collector people discover that we actually use "Military
Communications Gear from the Vietnam or Cold War", they would throw
money at us to get this stuff.

I'm counting on that not happening for a while and have been slowly
and selectively buying a few interesting items.

I hope to make the Howard County BRATS hamfest this weekend. Likely
someone who doesn't think like I do will have an interesting
boatanchor for sale.

About 40 years ago, I saw a KWM-2A that had been modified to include
a built-in 312B-4, or at least that's what it looked like. There
were two horizontal slots cut below and to either side of the PTO
knob. In each slot, the fellow had added the two levers from the
312B-4.

Would a collector turn it down? Probably, but I thought it was an
interesting radio.

Anyway, boatanchors are interesting radios. Fun to use. It's nice
to fix them up. I'm not into modifications though.

de ah6gi/4 at least none that can't be reversed.