Hallicrafters SX-24 Electrical Repair and Cleanup

How cool would be to have a pre-WWII communications receiver with a CRYSTAL PHASING filter? Well, I was offered this SX-24 and I accepted the challenge of cleaning it up!

The as-received SX-24 prior to all the work. It was covered in a layer of gunk, composition unknown and undesired to be known.

After clean-up and repair

Cleaning the chassis, using rags and Scrubbing Bubbles.

Lots of paper and wax capacitors to be replaced underneath the chassis.

One of the inital power-ups. I had trouble with audio final amplifier at first and was running off headphones. The original power transformer also self-immolated and as you can see in the right photo I replaced it. The replacement I was fortunate to find in an old tape-recorder pre-amp chassis.

Due to excessive attenuation I swabbed the crystal filter with isopropyl alcohol. It seemed to do the trick.

I strung new dial string and replaced the original dials with ones obtained from Radio Daze.

I was unable to separate the original bandspread dial from its shaft collar, so I turned a replacement shaft collar on the lathe and glued it to the new bandspread dial.

Created 23 April 2025
Edited 6 August 2025
end of line.