RGD 112A struggles.

[boater sam]

Just finishing off a refurb on a RGD 112A. I always thought that RGD was a quality brand, not so sure now.
Ignoring  the timber borer damage, they can all suffer from that, the cabinet is not particularly impressive, not well made at all.
The chassis is very untidy underneath, lots of components on long leads with no support and poor layout too.
But the real headache was the 2 cord drives!
Because both AM & FM use variable capacitor tuning, there are 2 concentric knobs and 2 pointers. Both cord drives are behind the tuning scale backplane and use plastic pulleys and bakelite drums.
The FM cord had broken the tiny hook moulded in the drum centre and fallen off.
It took me 11 attempts to get it all back in the correct relationship because the capacitor has a slow motion drive spindle so the drum has to rotate one and a half turns and the needle has to travel the correct way and distance when the tuning knob is turned, which of course is now the opposite way to the drum rotation. And to make it even harder, the FM drum was spinning loose on the cap spindle so I did not know where the start and end would be. Madness. No diagram in the sketchy service info either. And I thought Phillips were the worst!
But its all done and working now, just got to fill all the holes and re-stain and lacquer the cabinet.
Even found some Hunts black caps with paper labels that were still OK, there are though no cracked Hunts mouldy horrors in the set. 
Had the usual cooked EL84 due to coupling waxy  and the dim EM80. A fresh EABC80 made a big difference, sharpened the FM tuning point so the diodes must have been mis-matched somewhat.
Lots of perished rubber grommets holding the tuning backplane to the chassis, presumably as insulators from the non earthed chassis but as it now is fitted with a 3 core mains cable that is not a worry. I took an earth lead to the expanded metal speaker fret too.

[Crackle]

Is your model the same as the A112 http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/rgd_1_12.html
I think RGD when downhill just before being taken over by Regentone in the early 1950's.

Mike

[boater sam]

Er, yes, don't know my A from my elbow. Its actually model A1-12 according to the hymn sheet.
Quality does seem to be lacking but it performs well. I suspect from the valve line up that the circuit is a clone of everyone else's early FM but the twin tuning caps is different. With the slow motion gears, it takes a lot of winding up and down the waveband. The 2 gram versions are almost exactly the same chassis.
The woodworm liked it anyway. Many holes to fill.

[Nowhere-Man]

Just finishing off a refurb on a RGD 112A. I always thought that RGD was a quality brand, not so sure now.
Ignoring  the timber borer damage, they can all suffer from that, the cabinet is not particularly impressive, not well made at all.
The chassis is very untidy underneath, lots of components on long leads with no support and poor layout too.
But the real headache was the 2 cord drives!
Because both AM & FM use variable capacitor tuning, there are 2 concentric knobs and 2 pointers. Both cord drives are behind the tuning scale backplane and use plastic pulleys and bakelite drums.
The FM cord had broken the tiny hook moulded in the drum centre and fallen off.
It took me 11 attempts to get it all back in the correct relationship because the capacitor has a slow motion drive spindle so the drum has to rotate one and a half turns and the needle has to travel the correct way and distance when the tuning knob is turned, which of course is now the opposite way to the drum rotation. And to make it even harder, the FM drum was spinning loose on the cap spindle so I did not know where the start and end would be. Madness. No diagram in the sketchy service info either. And I thought Phillips were the worst!
But its all done and working now, just got to fill all the holes and re-stain and lacquer the cabinet.
Even found some Hunts black caps with paper labels that were still OK, there are though no cracked Hunts mouldy horrors in the set. 
Had the usual cooked EL84 due to coupling waxy  and the dim EM80. A fresh EABC80 made a big difference, sharpened the FM tuning point so the diodes must have been mis-matched somewhat.
Lots of perished rubber grommets holding the tuning backplane to the chassis, presumably as insulators from the non earthed chassis but as it now is fitted with a 3 core mains cable that is not a worry. I took an earth lead to the expanded metal speaker fret too.

It really boils down to whether the radio is "restoration friendly" or not. Some seem to have been built to last a solid 20 years or more so it wasn't thought somebody might appear 40 odd years later and do major repairs. I imagine it wouldn't have been usual for capacitors to need to be swapped a few years after manufacture.

As for the cabinet I tend to prefer Bakelite by far although I've seen one or two nice wooden finishes.

Anyway, well done for hanging on in.

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
The RGD sets of the later 40's were top quality, superbly engineered chassis and top quality cabinets. They hit hard times and by the time yours was built about mid fifties I would guess, all that quality was gone. Pity really.

[Radio Fixer]

I restored a 925 from 1936/7 but it wasn't that great a restoration as it was in poor shape when I got it and had been hacked by someone who shouldn't have attempted it.

To me it wasn't anything special having a highly sectionalised chassis which looked impressive but didn't do much for performance.  This was certainly no better than top EMI sets (561 or 650) which used simpler construction.  Its likely that the EMI labs had the best teams of engineers.  As to the cabinet;  well built to impress, being massively heavy, but IMO very ugly with large wings that did nothing for it.

I think a lot of RGD sales were built on marketing hype, I remember they used to have full page adverts in WW, often on the back.  They were certainly highly priced and I expect many were bought by the rich for bragging rights.

Sorry if anyone is a fan of them ...

Gary

[Murphyv310]

   
Hi.
I'm sure if you looked at RGD radiograms of the 1946-1950 era you wuld change your mind the 746G which i had was superb, the 1046 was even higher quality. These sets used decent components and those surviving till today are often on all of their original components.

The picture of this one has a Quad 22, FM tuner and amp fitted, I retained the original AM section which is built like a battleship. Great radiogram.

[Herald1360]

Is that a Quad 22 or a QC2? Presumably the RGD is or was mono.

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
Yes indeed the 746 was mono. It was 3.5 watts but the original speaker and decent cabinet actually worked well. I'd obtained the Quad preamp and FM tuner and these were added to the original amp initially. Later on I replaced the RGD amp and fitted a different speaker. Now I've no idea where the set is. It landed up north with Phil, (Fidobsa) but he's now in Hungary and we don't communicate these days.