you need to look at the bottom side of the turntable unit. if a motor is under the center it is direct drive; if this doesn’t run then it is the motor or a connection to the motor (switch or broken/disconnected wire). if a motor is off to the side (indirect drive) then a belt would run through a pulley; if this belt is gone then it won’t run as well as anything that could be wrong with the direct drive type turntable. there is another case where the motor is indirect drive and the motor would spin a rubber tire rubbing on the platter; if this tire was gone it wouldn’t run. there were synthetic rubbers that belts and tires were made of that would just disintegrate into a pile of rubbery goo.
I’m not quite getting the love for this old unit. While Blaupunkt is a respected name the unit you are dealing with is ancient, fragile, possibly electrically dangerous, a potential fire hazard, expensive to refurbish, and even if restored to working condition the fidelity performance will be relatively poor. If you use it to play vinyl records it will beat them to shit.
What’s the upside here?
restoring old electronics is similar to people that restore furniture or cars. it is an enjoyable skilled pursuit. it can cost money, so it is good to pick your specimens carefully.
I’m thinking by now you should go back and read the fine print about the thing being ‘operational’ and ‘used daily’ - clearly they pulled your leg.
I would be looking to gut it and replace with modern electronics only keeping the cabinet part looking ‘retro’.
Okay, update! I didn’t really investigate the turntable (I didn’t realize it just lifted off!) because I was trying to find somebody local who knew what they were doing to take a look at it.
Called the local guitar store, they had me call the local audio store. Called them, they had me call Calvin at the one place I found online claiming to work on vintage electronics. Called Calvin, and before I got done explaining he said “NO.”
So I called the local vinyl shop and they gave me the name of this guy who they couldn’t really attest to but who they had the business card of on their desk. No idea if this guy is a serial rapist or not, but I call him and he comes to look at it today.
Guy spends HOURS experimenting. Guy will not give up. Guy works out one thing, thinks we need new tubes, tries cleaning contacts, tries circuits, just keeps dogging at it. At one point he says “I don’t know what to do now. I should probably call this guy Calvin.” I disabuse him.
Anyway, hours later he has it working (although the turntable needs a slip thing on it.) It sounds SWEET. It has a beautiful warm tone, there are lights I didn’t even knew lit up, the radio works (but needs a better antenna), etc. Guy is still upset because he can’t get the AM radio to work. (Keep in mind he has fixed the turntable to where it does what it was designed to do and returns to the beginning of a record once it’s finished, something our modern turntable does not do.) The transformation is incredible, and I am amazed.
He didn’t want to accept anything appropriate as payment. I offered him $200 for hours and hours of work, because I didn’t know where to start because when I asked him how much I owed him he hemmed and hawed and buried himself in the stereo, and he almost dropped dead of shock. Frankly I was afraid it wasn’t nearly enough, considering he’s the only guy in town who would look at it. Advised him to raise his rates.
You do realize he would probably pay you if he had to.
I think that was a very reasonable payment.
So, you have FM and the turntable working? Also, I saw on that web page that at least some models have shortwave bands – do you have that, and if so are they working?
he sounds like a very cool guy. even though $200 was a large added cost to you he used years and decades of experience to give you a working unit.
some people get lots of pleasure from problem solving and what it does to repair. it seems that it needed careful knowledgeable tweaking to bring it to life, old electronics are like that.
getting new/old replacement tubes and platter mat shouldn’t be too expensive. this guy would likely have sources.
tube radios, more so with consoles, need a good antenna for AM. many had loop antennas on the inside of the rear cover for an internal antenna. you could hire this guy to make a back for you with an antenna on it, ask him.
It does have shortwave - not sure if its not working or if it needs an antenna but sound isn’t coming out of it with that button down.
We did, by the way, write down all the tubes so we could find replacements (which at that time in the repair we thought we needed) - some of them must be very hard to get to, or my model isn’t at all online, because that Vintage Radio site has at least 6 or 7 in all the Arkansas models and we only found five! It’s hard to get up in there though. One of them we couldn’t read the numbers on, and it seems some have been replaced with near equivalents made much later. A whole realm of knowledge, it seems, of astonishing breadth and depth.
I can’t help but be enchanted by the mix of beauty and stuck-together-with- spit of these vintage units. It’s so charming to me that people invented this stuff and that it worked - works! It really just needed a bit of polishing up, some following circuits with a bit of repair, getting buttons to make good contact… Astonishing, really.
those units had lots of mechanical elements switching, tuning and the turntable; with the materials of the time they took some good design to work well.
they were made to be very good looking furniture as well.
Glad you found a good guy to work on it, Zsofia.
This is not true at all, unless you’re using the cheap tape (real electrical tape costs a few bucks a roll, not <$1), or don’t know how to wrap (if you’re not stretching it, you’re doing it wrong).
There are a bunch of places that still make tubes, even custom ones, that you can find with a Google search. I suspect the problems will be more in identifying mystery tubes, than getting them, though I have no idea what it would cost to have a tube made. So maybe expense would be another barrier.
The tubes in a set like this will be pretty generic, and you should be able to source them without too much trouble. There are tubes still in production, but they target the guitar amp and specialist HiFi markets, and the range is pretty limited compared to the range in the hayday of tube technology. Different markets had different designations for otherwise identical tubes.
A good place to start with finding equivalents is here.
The thing is, at least one of them seems to have either had the designation misstamped or worn off - there was one that just said “DWB”, which doesn’t seem to be a thing. And the Radio Museum site is excellent about telling you the tubes for certain models (and mine doesn’t seem to be one of them, and I realize this is not complete, but yet…) and one these wasn’t on any of the lists but my guy says he’s seen very frequently in guitar amps, so perhaps there was a substitution… You can evidently totally get the tubes if you can figure out what you need, although there’s a crazy-ass price differential between brand names. You can get anything, if you can pay for it. It’s figuring out what exactly to get and not screwing it up that’s the hard thing, and it’s not like you can really test these things in situ with the equipment the guy who will work on it when nobody else will touch it has.
ETA - I do want to have replacements on hand - we don’t think there’s a problem with any of the tubes now that we hear the phono sound, but of course they won’t last forever. However, figuring out what on earth previous owners replaced tubes with is a whole nother layer to this thing… I really wish it was more clear what model we had to start with!
Heh. It wasn’t that kind of guy - not an obsessive hobbyist. (He was going to say “NO GOD NO” just like Calvin until I mentioned that it had buttons, at which point he began to think that maybe the buttons just weren’t making contact.)
He’d messed around with these things before but really didn’t feel qualified. Admirable fellow - had some experience with tubes in guitar amps but a lot more about circuits, so he kept testing things until they all made sense and didn’t stop butting his head against it and trying other ideas until it worked. It was a very incremental improvement - first he made the radio make a radio noise, and then over the hours it sounded marginally better every time he said “OH!”, and then I think he almost gave up on the turntable but he didn’t, which is why I called the people I got his number from and told them I was very impressed. I was ready to start talking about writing off some of my investment and installing modern components into the vintage case, but he didn’t give up as easily as I did.
And to think I carefully acted like I forgot to put my large ugly dog up when he rang the bell, just in case he were a serial rapist. 
12DW8 perhaps. That is one I could easily imagine being used in such a set.
If you want more info/tech help for this console talk to the wonderful denizens of “Audiokarma”. There are guys (and gals) by the score who are very knowledgeable and more than willing to help you sort out any remaining problems. Depending on where you live, there might be a ‘karmic unit’ living nearby who could provide help.
Go to the ‘tube audio’ forum, describe your console/problem (w/ as many pictures as you like) and I’m sure you’ll get good advice.
Tell 'em Philliam (Audiokarma member, but tube dummy) sent you - I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
it helps to use a magnifying glass and look and get light from different angles. you can often see worn paint and bad stamping that way.
There were shitty electronics then as now, witness the enormous quantities of AA5 radios still around, but there were true works of American engineering and artistry, and tube audio has a specific “sound” that’s difficult or impossible to duplicate with solid state electronics. A Fisher 500C is absolutely a work of art and one of the best recievers ever made (although you need to know what you’re getting into, as some of the tubes and lamps are long out of production).