After completing around 25 projects refurbishing and modding old Gameboys I took a bit of a pause to do something else.

I set my sight on old transistor radios. I previously did a re-capping of the Braun T220 and after that project was done I bought an 1955 Braun SK2 on Ebay that was in need of a lot of love.

I won’t lie, this project has taken forever to finish. I did all the rookie mistakes, but hey that’s the best way to learn something new, isn’t it. Finally it’s completed and I can show you some photos. And if I may say so myself, damn it’s beautiful.

This is what I did:

• Glued and fixed a crack in the case.
• Removed all the yellowed paint on the case and front.
• Removed the original weave on the back of the front.
• Repainted the front with a semigloss white paint.
• Spray glued a new fine weave made of white linen on the backside of the front.
• Repainted the case with three coats of matte white paint, then water-sanded with a 1200 sandpaper.
• Scanned the original paper dial, which was very yellowed and with almost unreadable text. Cleaned up the image in Photoshop then printed a new one in high quality. I carefully sprayed the paper with a sealer and finally glued it to the front.

My blue 1961 transistor radio Braun T220 works pretty good but since I’m planning to put it on Ebay I decided it was time to do the electronics versions of an oil change: The re-cap. Changing all the capacitors.

Opening it up I could find eight metal capacitors and one biggie made out of paper. When old gear is failing, the first suspect is almost always the electrolytic capacitors. I have previously repaired a Samsung monitor and a Samsung TV where the only fault was a couple of bulging caps. Total cost to fix that was under a dollar.

All the old capacitors from the Braun T220

In this case where the radio is close to 60 years, there is no reason to keep any of the old caps. If they haven’t completely failed yet it’s just a matter of time and if you would measure their values they are probably all over the place. It wasn’t that much work. It took me around three hours to de-solder all of them and putting in brand new ones. I had to be extra careful not to break any of the many thin copper wires that were soldered left and right in a way you don’t see in newer tech.

The inside of the Braun T220, before the re-cap

Powering on the T220 again I was very happy to find that everything was working and the FM signal now was much stronger than before. Also the sound volume was louder and clearer in a way that I had not anticipated. I guess the radio now sounds like it did when it was new in 1961.

All in all the whole process was pretty fun and much easier than what I had imagined it would be. Everything turned out great, which is not always the case when you start poking around in ancient tech.

The inside of the Braun T220, post re-cap