crosley: 468; B-468-A Restoration

Is it okay to polish the wood, and also I was wondering if anyone know if the presets were custom made. The model I purchased has WIBW, KMBC and several other midwest stations so I was wondering if those presets came factory unique.

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Hi Josh,

It is generally fine to polish the wood finish; however be aware that some modern furniture polishes contain silicone oil.  This is quite useful for resisting future stains and keeping dust off, but it can cause some problems later for refinishing.  The silicone oil is hard to remove and can interfere both with stripping the finish and applying new finish.  If you don't think the radio needs to be refinished, no need to worry about this and you can polish with typical furniture products.

The station name tags were put in place by the original owner, or more likely, by the dealer who sold the radio.  Radios often came with a sheet of punch-out station tags, one for every station in the country (or perhaps region) so that whatever station was needed would have an available tag.  I believe there are some places making reproduction station tags.  Check the supplier list and I think you might find a source if you want to change the station tags.  On the other hand, the original station tags have a little story to tell -- they indicate where the radio was originally used, and often point to stations that no longer exist.  A little history captured in the original station tags.

Best regards,

Tom

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It was quite a learning experience, three of the four stations on the front are now using different call letters, though they still point to the same frequency. And WIBW in Topeka, Kansas has been around forever. That's cool to know though, I may try to track down some cut-outs if I can though and try to change them to the same stations with the new call letters. 

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Dear Josh
You have shown us a nice photo of the four station buttons. The photo is perhaps not so clear because you did not reduce the pixels to 933 width (max. 1400 hight). But it is all readable. The automatic process of downsizing from (here) 1280 c 960 pixels to the optimum of 933 pixels is probably not of good quality, specially if persons just leave the original size of the camera like 2800 pixels. Therefore I told the programmer to take that resizing process off. Such pictures will now be rejected with a notice.

I'm sure you will (hopefully) some more photos of your set, once done with restoring or polishing the wood. In that case, please click the link FAQ and in there the illustrated step-by-step HOWTO article for preparing and uploading pictures with the free program Irfanview. After the red text "Here are our suggestions" there is the link to article "how to optimize the quality of your photos" using the free software IrfanView which gives you also the download address (link).

You see the add for this radio. This is the best perspective to show your set as first picture in your collection page. Never just show the front only but those three dimensions. The picture is also nicely cropped (tight to show the object as big as possible). If yours is an original knob, then please show it separately, followed by the rear of the set, the chassis and if you open it anyway for repair or a look, please photograph also the wiring BEFORE you make any change. Normally most important is also the plate or sticker or even schematic or tube lay-out. This time if possible frontal without flash-light - as you would do it also for a scale.

You then can select your main picture to be shown in your collection page - instead of the four buttons. Only the owner (and super admin) can see the link "To sort pictures". Nice is your Sterling LS-4, but you could redo with the 3 dimensions instead of two and putting it on a neutral place (without other objects) and cropping tight. I don't know if you could not focus it (the scale is fuzzy) or if that mentioned process does that. Hopefully you did not yet restore the chassis and can show us the wiring after taking apart.

You have done something very nice: You have put in a forum article by using the model to start with. This then makes the text sticky to the model page. Every owner (not only members!) can get more information. This is one of the unique features which we should use more.

You are a very recent member (April 17, 2012) who joined for free and who is already enlarging our huge database by many collector prices (which stick naturally to the model), by enhancing the model data and adding pictures. I can only congratulate you, since I know that for quite some members, our programs are too difficult to handle and they don't use the Help-Info-Button above right of each page ....

One reason for difficulties is that the programs were made during a period of 12 years where the technique changed, new possibilities were added (like for instance the mouse-over-type of selecting at the model pages). We added and added new features - and hope that we soon can stop adding but start to reprogram some older pages.

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