for anyone wanting to resore old tube radios , this is a good place to start reading:
https://antiqueradio.org/recap.htm
if you look on ebay, or locally, there are lots of offerings as long as one is reasonably complete it's usually restorable. manly , if you take an old radio and check resistors, replace any bad ones and replace all the electrolytic and paper caps then it will often work quite well. there is more to it like alignment and tube checking and other repairs but for the most part its bad capacitors. Tubes store for many years and see little use . the only ones I have problems sourcing tubes for are really old stuff that was made int he early 20's and some used specific antique tube types. peanut tubes, WD11's are examples.
If anyone is local to Vancouver or wants to pay shipping I can find some interesting projects. One thing I wont work on or bring home is square boring cabinets. i also tend to not work on anything with PC boards or transistors. about the only exception is european radios, blaupunkt , grundig nordmende etc, some of those have tubes and FM although most are mono they have more frequency range than most of the US made radios. I tend to want to do those occasionally as they do have FM whereas most old radios are just AM short wave etc. all talk radio now mostly..
FM wasn't mainstream until the mid 60's and transistors were taking over that market then. most of those european style radios had "piano keys" along the front . They were tube radios but they were built upon circuit boards. earlier radios were all point to point wiring , no circuit boards. occasionally you may run into a Tar block which is a bunch of components sealed into a metal box encased in tar. For the most part they have lots of room to work in and around.
there were some "FM radios" that were made to receive on the "Armstrong band" be careful, because they are useless as there is no such broadcast, they went the way of the beta VCR - never saw popularity.. I have some examples.. if restored they will only play static.
The mid 60's european radios used electrostatic tweeters and had more sophisticated circuits. some were stereo but most were not. those can be fun to listen to as they will receive FM. Some collectors re-broadcast MP3s or FM stations over AM , its a way to play the music you like but for me the challenge is to make them work and look nice For every day use I have 70's stereo gear I use daily. Id love a nice big tube stereo amp for daily use. a Thorens and a Mckintosh maybe ;-) ... I could trade a restored antique radio..
and yes the tread was mainly centered around using 70's equipment for modern day use I just interjected a bit..I do find more modern hollow state audiofile equipment interesting too, so back to our normally scheduled programming now ;-)