Victor Talking Machine Electrola RE-45 (1929)

[Mike_J]

Hi Folks:
The local junk shop has the above for sale.
He'll let me have it for $100.
It doesn't work and needs re-wiring, but the cabinet is actually in lovely condition, as the the (heavy) tone arm.
At some point, someone took off the feet.
And the outside top of the lid is rough.
The speaker is intact and everything is there - except the feet.
I can't decide if this is a good thing to get.
Any feedback that will help me decide?
Thanks!

[wjw]

Very nice, complete examples of this machine don't seem to fetch much money. There are still a lot of these around. I paid $175 for a semi-working beauty several years ago. Great looking cabinet. I think you can make money off the parts since the cabinet is bad.
Hopefully Greg Bogantz will answer this (I love reading his posts!)

[gregbogantz]

Thanks for the heads-up, wjw. It's hard to say what electrical restoration you might need to do with an RE-45, but it could be very little or quite a lot. If you're willing to take an adventure with it, you could find yourself with a really excellent sounding radio phono from 1929. These Victors are the best sounding sets from this year in my experience. The secret is the truly excellent speaker which was not used in any other Victor models of other model years or in any RCA product from around this period. It was several years before RCA once again used a good speaker and made a set that sounded this good.

The tuner chassis of these sets are very durable and seldom need much restoration apart from cleaning them up. The down-side is that amplifier chassis in these sets are fairly notorious for having bad transformers, particularly the power transformer (PT) and the audio input transformer (IT). The PT can be pretty readily replaced with a more modern equivalent, but the IT is much harder to come by. This IT is unusual in that it has two primary windings - one used to couple the radio signal to the amp and the other winding producing a large amount of gain to couple the magnetic phono pickup to the amp. Transformers like this are almost impossible to find new today. So if you have a bad one, you just about have little choice but to get a replacement from a donor chassis. The magnetic pickup is the standard horseshoe magnet style that is easy to refurbish - several people out there can do it if you don't want to do it yourself. The phono motor is an induction disc style that is pretty plentiful if you need parts for it. Tubes are still pretty available and not expensive with one exception: The #45 output triodes are drooled over by golden-ear tube weenies and command a high price, but I think they are actually now being made again by tube factories (YES! There are still factories making tubes), so the price has come down from what they were a few years ago.

The RE-45 (the RE-75 is the same set in a fancier cabinet) is my favorite radio/phono set from the 1920s. Nothing sounds better. And the radio is a really excellent and sensitive TRF circuit that works very well. So if you're willing to take a chance, I would say it is easily worth taking a shot at it for $100. There are people out there selling the amp chassis from these to the tube weenies for over $200 on eBay, so you could probably part it out for more than you've got invested in it if you ever needed to do that. But I would encourage you to try to get it working. I think you'll really like it.

[Mike_J]

Thanks Guys!
I went and had a closer look at the machine the other day.
The outside of the cabinet has seen better days. The finish is flaked, cracked and alligatored in parts. It looks like it has spent years in a damp basement. The inside is still pretty nice though.
I had a look inside, and wow, what a mess! A spaghetti of wires and rust and dust. Again, looking like it's spent time in a damp place. I couldn't see if the speaker was still intact. But I'm sure it is.
My gut reaction was that it would take a lot of time and effort to eventually get this working, as well as looking reasonably nice. As well as coming up with some replacement leg options.
Very disappointing, and I feel bad about abandoning it to its fate.
But...if you still think it's a good deal, even in this state, I'll have one more look at it...