More Than a Hobby

Daniel Conant gives voice and presence back to old radios

By John Addyman

 

On a summer Saturday two years ago, my wife and I were out doing our thing — visiting every garage sale we could find.

On our way home, we stopped at a sale in Palmyra that didn’t look like it would offer much, but we had a few minutes to kill.

Inside the building was a huge, dark place filled with molds for ceramic objects…not something we were interested in.

But in one corner, there were eight old radios.

What struck me immediately is that they were objects I loved in my very tender years, when I listened to my 78 records of Bambi and Little Toot, with my ear up against the speaker of the radio-phonograph my dad had proudly placed in our living room.

That corner housed old radios, yes…but they looked brand-new. The cabinets were shiny. There wasn’t a fleck of dust on any of them. The dials were bright and I turned one on that was plugged in. It produced sound right away.

“Where did these come from?” I asked the woman hosting the garage sale, Linda Conant. “Are they for sale?”

“They’re from my husband,” she said. “He fixes up old radios. It’s his hobby.”

“Fixes” didn’t come close to describing what I was looking at.

The chassis beneath each radio’s cabinet was spotless and smooth to the touch. These radios were easily 70 years old, but they looked brand new, even with the ancient-looking tubes glowing resolutely inside.

Daniel Conant, 73, from Marion, is the craftsman, the technician, the artist who brings something most people would consider nothing more than a boat anchor back to life, back to usefulness, back to enjoyment.

He retired three years ago after a career that filled out the kind of resume that would lead him to acquire the ability to resurrect something electronic: he graduated from high school and went right to work for his dad and brothers, building houses. He learned carpentry. He acquired electrician’s skills.

From there he got a job at Scientific Calculations installing computers, then programming them. He carried that into work for Monroe County, doing more programming, then to Rochester General Hospital and on to years as a consultant installing graphic computer stations all over the country.

“I did a lot of flying,” he said. “I got sick of flying. I don’t care if I never see another plane in my life.”

When he moved to Marion in Wayne County, he acquired a lot of grass, a forest behind his home, a garage and a barn. As it turned out, he needed it all.

“It was when I retired three years ago that I literally started to look at radios,” he explained from his basement lab, where his workbench covers one wall and a computer station nestles in a second. It’s a man cave for a tinkerer.

The hobby literally came to him.

“I had a console radio my aunt and uncle gave me. It worked, but not very well. I decided, OK, I’m going to look at it and see what’s wrong with it and get it to work correctly…and I did. I worked on that, probably on and off for about a year. I was still doing programming at the time.

“What I found out in working on that was that somebody else had been in there messing around with it, by me comparing the schematics with what was there. Someone had made a few mistakes. There were some parts in there that shouldn’t have been there and some wirings going to the wrong places…that kind of thing. I still run into that today. I don’t think I’m ever going to get away from that.”

The unit he worked on for so long — and on which he learned so much about radios in the process — was a Stromberg Carlson, a high-dollar unit for that time.

“It had a record player on one side and a radio on the other side and big speakers and it was about five feet wide. The radio itself inside there can be quite popular; you can get $400 – $500 for a good one. There’s one sitting on eBay now for $200 and it’s rusty — I wouldn’t give him $50 for it.”

 

Season work

The renovation process starts with Conant assessing the radio and doing it with painstaking care.

“I clean them up before I start working on the parts. I make them nice and shiny. They don’t all come out [the way I want them to]; some have a lot of rust on them. Some of the chasses I will paint silver or gold or give them a clear satin finish so they’ll stay nice and clean.”

When you look at a very old radio, the wooden cabinet is the first thing that looks like it needs help.

“If the veneer [the outermost thin layer of wood] is all there, I’ll scrape all the smudge off, re-stain it and put a new finish on it,” he explained, pointing to one cabinet that looked like it had been sanded down.

And here is where all that space in the garage and barn comes in handy. For Conant, resurrecting a radio is seasonal work.

The process starts in the garage, where he had six cabinets sitting there, all of them sanded and ready for the next steps. “I like to add some color to these things. Some of them are kind of blah — they’re all one color. I like to add some color. There are purists out there that wouldn’t do that. I’m not a purist. I like to do things the way I like to do them — I like to make these radios look more alive.

“During the summer, most of my time is spent on cabinet work. It’s dirty work so I can do it out in my barn. I clean a chassis out there as well. Clean-up makes lots of dirt. In the wintertime, I do the work on the chassis — change the parts out, figure out what’s wrong with it. Sometimes I have to rewind coils. I probably spend in the wintertime four hours most days — in the summertime, I have other interests — the woods out back that I’m cleaning up, I cut trees down, mow the lawn…there’s a lot of time spent mowing the lawn out here — the grass grows too fast.”

Where do parts for a 70-year-old radio come from?

Conant said he gets the precious tubes from internet suppliers. And, frankly, the more tubes in a radio — like some of the old 20-tube Philco 38-690s — the more he’s interested in the challenge of fixing it. “I have to have a need to do something,” he said, revealing the nugget of this hobby.

On the other hand, his son is using a 3D printer to make control knobs for him. And on Conant’s workbench he has capacitors where he had removed the old wax ends, taken out the old wiring and inserted new wires that aid in the tuning of frequencies. He puts the wax back and you’d never know the thing is new inside.

He has about 20 radios in the hallway next to his basement lab and next door on walls in the actual basement. They’re all for sale, more or less. There are another 10 he’s slowly getting to completion.

“I don’t sell that many, on Facebook and eBay,” he said. “Not that I really want to keep them all. I need to start culling the herd. I have some AC/DC radios, the ones that were tubular in series — that means they’re like the old-fashioned Christmas tree lights — if one goes out the whole thing goes out. They don’t have a power transformer in them.”

He cautions about them because they can get hot.

“If you have them plugged in wrong or your house is wired wrong or the chassis can be hot. I’m kind of steering away from those. Those are some I’m getting rid of and I make sure people understand — don’t use them in the bathroom or kitchen, that kind of stuff. They’re all right — that’s what they had back in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. If they were considered safe back then they’re probably considered safe today. I haven’t had any complaints on anything I sell. I try to be honest about it, do a good job, describe this is what it is…

“I probably could sell all 20, but I wouldn’t. Some I really like and some I’ve put a lot of time into. I would never get the money out of it I put into it and I understand that. My calculation is that my labor is free. I’m not going to get paid for my labor. If I can’t sell them for what the parts cost me, forget it. That’s money out of my pocket.”

He said he’d sell all the AC/DC radios. “It’s not that I didn’t do a good job on them, I’ve moved on,” he added.

Conant has radios in all states of refurbishing. Some he buys; some are given to him. He has worked on RCAs, Crosleys, Sears Silvertones, Montgomery Ward Airlines, and Zeniths. But Philcos are his favorites.

 

Museum-quality radios

Looking at what he’s accomplished from start to finish on a radio that limped in the door silently, giving it new presence and voice, is remarkable. Many look like they should be on display in a museum. He can spend a year on a radio, getting everything right to his satisfaction.

“Nobody has asked me to donate to a museum,” he said. “But I have museum-quality radios.”

Conant figures this is what he’ll spend retirement doing.

“I’m happy,” he said, pushing back in his chair at the computer. “I enjoy it, I really do. It’s nothing that I’ve got to work on it right now and get it done — it’s not like that. I’ll work on something when I feel like it. I’ll work on it for a while, take a break and watch a YouTube video or something or help somebody else with a radio or get some new ideas.”

Or in the summer, he’ll go out and mow the lawn…