It’s been a few years since Seagull started, and we’ve enjoyed working with and hearing from our customers – especially the stories about the radios. Some have deep family history – back to WWII or the Depression. Some just rekindle childhood memories. Some of our younger customers start by seeing a radio in an antique store and wondering what the heck it is! Whatever your story, you have a radio and felt it was worth restoring.
Here are a few stories. We’d love to hear yours and include it here!
The Railroadman’s Radio
George Davey was a railroad man in the southwest. He began by laying track for the Santa Fe Railroad when he was 16 years old. He became a brakeman and then a conductor on the Trinidad (CO) to Raton (NM) line. He jumped to the El Paso and Southwestern RR working the Tombstone to Fairbank line. Fairbank is now a ghost town in Cochise County. He finished his career running the fast freight trains between El Paso and Tucson. He was what today we might call a news junkie, so he bought this Philco “Baby Grand” Cathedral radio for $49 in 1933 upon his retirement. He had moved his family to Tucson by that time and KGAR, Tucson’s first AM radio station had been live for seven years by that time (now KTUC).
God bless anyone who touched George’s prized Philco! The family would gather around the radio to listen to FDR’s address to the nation, news of the Depression and Hitler’s rise to power.
George’s grandson Edward became the Philco’s new owner after George passed in 1940. Edward completed his Electrical Engineering Degree from the University of Arizona after his tour as a bomber navigator over Germany in WWII. He fitted the radio with a headphone outlet and installed a modern permanent magnet 8 inch speaker. He changed some of the old vacuum tubes to modern tubes as the old ones burnt out.
The Philco gathered dust for decades until George’s great-grandson (another Edward) had the radio rebuilt to original vacuum tube configuration. The sound was scratchy and there really wasn’t much of interest on the AM stations in the 21st century. Ed kept the ratio simply as a curiosity, planning to “do something” with it eventually. Upon his retirement great-grandson Ed refinished the cabinet and retrofitted the electronics with the Seagull Bluetooth board. And a new life is born for what remains a beautiful instrument! It now sits in Ed’s den, playing whatever he wants.
The Radio in the Garage
I was fortunate to have grown up in a home in the San Francisco Bay Area with a four-car garage stuffed with antique cars, motorcycles, mini-bikes, and other pieces of machinery. The best thing about the shop was the full set of tools, scrap material, fasteners, and old junk us kids could repair or repurpose.
My dad couldn’t remember when he got this 1939 Stewart Warner 01-6G radio, but I remember it always lived on a shelf in the garage. During the day, we kids blasted rock-and-roll, soul, and Motown from the San Francisco stations KFRC, and KYA. At night, dad would listen to the classical music stations, KKHI and KIBE. Every time the station was changed, the radio acquired more greasy fingerprints, and eventually it was hard to see the wood under the grime – the knobs changed from tan to black!
That garage was where I picked up my lifelong passions of music and engineering. As I got older, dad and I would sometimes put our tools down and just enjoy music together. Next, the radio sat in the attic of our Southern California home for forty years. In 2020 I refinished and refurbished it. Since I couldn’t find a suitable Bluetooth module I created the Seagull Bluetooth Retrofit. Fittingly, it now lives in our garage where I play all kinds of music (…just ask my neighbors!)
He “Likes Old Things”
(Editor’s Note: Andrew was one of our brave first customers who bought the kit before the Potentiometer and Wiring Kit was available!) I like old things, so I bought this 1932 RCA Superette with plans of restoring it, not understanding that home AC was 10 less volts in 1932 and that I would need a voltage regulator to run a restored machine. But no matter, so I started digging into it and realized that the field coil speaker was disintegrating, the chassis was in rough shape, and most of the tubes were missing, so in deciding what to do with this otherwise cool looking radio, I found Seagull’s kit on Etsy and decided this was perhaps a more feasible project.
As with any project, you are going to have that one thing that trips you up; finding the correct potentiometers with a shaft long enough to fit though the wood case took some doing, but I was able to make it happen. I highly doubt any postwar radio had this much material in them, so unless you’re working with a very old unit, this shouldn’t be an issue. Wiring everything together was very easy to do and the board was arranged well. I mounted it to a scrap piece of plywood that I finished and stained, isolated with rubber grommets, added some tweeters for the high notes, and the unit sounds amazing. Reminds me of a Bose wave radio is the best comparison for sound that I can give.
I highly recommend this project. I’m not an electrical wizard, I learned DC from working on muscle cars as a kid, if I can do it anybody can. It was a fun project and the end result was this very cool rock and roll radio.
He Bought it for the Cabinet
I purchased this old RCA radio at a local thrift store because it fit so well into the decor of our home. I purchased it knowing that it was missing several original parts and could not be used as is. I made the purchase more for the cabinet knowing that a local gentleman had converted an old family Zenith floor model to Bluetooth. I was not able to locate that person, so I started researching how to convert the table top radio to Bluetooth and discovered Seagull. I received the kit quickly and ordered a speaker they recommended. Upon watching the video and reviewing the instructions for installation the process went well ( including the retrofit of the knobs). It now sits on a shelf in our living room and provides hours of great sound.
The Travel Trailer Radio
My wife really enjoys vintage things as well as camping, and she always wanted a 1954 Spartan Mansion. After a couple of years searching, we were able to acquire this one. She found an old console with a TV, record player, and radio. We had the record player restored, and I took the face frame from the TV and installed a flat screen behind it. Then I installed the Seagull Retrofit. You turn on the radio using the actual radio knob, this lights up the radio display as well as turns on the Seagull Bluetooth system. Very happy with the look and how it dressed up the trailer. (Editor’s Note: He sent “before and after” pictures, and the craftsmanship and details of the trailer are incredible!)