Westinghouse H126 "Little Jewel" Refrigerator radio

I bought this several months ago and shotgun recapped it, since almost all the paper caps were split open.

the guy who owned it was a "TRF man" and did not know anything about regenerative radios. whatever.

It worked fine for about 5 minutes or so, then started acting up, with garbled audio and only being able to sort of tune one station, but when you would stop moving the tuning dial it would lose the station or at least that's what it sounded like.

Months pass and I let it sit on a shelf, today I decided to start anew. I went throught the radio and checked the resistors, replaced a few out of spec. I thought maybe the problem was with the oscillator so I replaced a 47pf cap related to that. cleaned the 12sk7 and 12sa7 sockets, freed up a trimmer cap that was a little rusted. changed out the antenna wires, tried a different antenna, but nothing really made a difference.

then... I was going through the radio with my signal tracer, and not really being able to trace an RF signal I decided to make sure the AF was working, I was getting the same audio from the signal tracer as I got from the radio, until I placed the probe on the center pin of the volume control. All of a sudden I got clear audio from both the signal tracer AND the radio, AND the tuning started working. If I removed the ground wire of the signal tracer from the radio chassis and touched the center pin of the volume pot it went back to the way it was.

I spent most of the day working on it, and after replacing all of the original mica caps, I found that if I placed a resistor to ground in certain places the audio would return. I thought about this for a while and realized that all the components in question went through the volume pot to ground.

I pulled the volume pot and opened it up, this is what I found.

 It is hard to tell from the above picture, but the carbon is missing from the last 3/8" of the pot.

I did not think I had one so I took a break and went over to my brothers house for a while.
When I came back I looked though my stash of pots with switches and low and behold I had the exact replacement a 500k pot, with a switch AND a 100k tap.

I installed it and it work fine.

The last problem was that the original speaker was trashed.

I found a usable speaker, drilled the bracket off the back of the old speaker, attached it to the new one and mounted the speaker.

 I also made a new mask for the speaker and glued that and the speaker cloth to the speaker.

I repainted the sides and did an alignment.

 good as new.