Ten years ago, Chris Hadfield (Chris Hadfield) recorded this marvel which remains one of the masterpieces of music and astronautics. Entirely shot on International Space Station, he released it the day before he returned to Earth at the end of Exp. 35.

And it lives!

Today's real challenge though, rebuild a Rola Re-Creator horn speaker!

It was open, and I pulled the driver apart, impressed with the construction enough to attempt a rebuild.

Fortunately I have some #40 wire, though I will have to take few layers off until I can get past the shelf-wear on the spool. It will be a challenge to do this without breaking the wire! (I think the original may be #42)

The bobbins are so brittle, they crumble when I try to take the old wire off. I found the open halfway through one of the coils. I bet I could get a pair of bobbins printed for me somewhere. Meanwhile, I'm going to temporarily "fix" it with an old headphone element.

It will be interesting winding the bobbins, as just overcoming the inertia of the wire reel can be enough to snap the wire. And with the coil being oval and not round, there will be two "pulses" each rotation as I wind it to further exacerbate the challenge.

Here's a Stromberg-Carlson headset piece, with the diaphragm cut down, and soldered to the armature of the original mica diaphragm.

And it works, and is louder than my Atwater-Kent next to it. Not sure if the A-K is up to snuff though. Next step, get one of my battery radio going and see.

Other than bending the armature wire on the mica diaphragm, I've kept everything else original, and retained the original parts should I ever get the coils rewound.

My second model 70 Philco in a month. This one, I bet, has filter capacitor issues.

Simple issue on the Philco.. Not sure what those extra wires were for, maybe for testing. Poor radio has a lot of rust in it, but looks pristine from the outside. The po put a LOT of love and work into it.

I spent the last couple of days cleaning out the shop. I had a couple pieces of test equipment on the bench I was never using, so I put them away, and plugged in a couple variable regulated power supplies that I was using a lot. Got a 1961 Zenith Royal 500H on the bench first.

garysradios.com/royal-500

It lives! Previous person to work on it looks like they cleaned out some corrosion, but then soldered a wire from the mixer coil to the tuning cap frame instead of the cap itself, which killed the oscillator transistor. I moved the wire, installed a spare germanium PNP.

The radio has an unusually large speaker for a transistor radio of the day, and it does really sound good.

See how it magnet is offset!