I would attach at least 4m of aerial wire and a signal earth.

have you missed any of the wax/electrolytic caps? sometimes they are in the IF cans

Try moving the valves in their sockets, could be dirt .

Check coils/wavechange switch for continuity -your violins could have been from Shortwave picked up by the oscillator coil 

nearly there good luck 

For those of you who expressed a desire to own one of these earler in this thread, I came across this one on a swedish site:

I think this particular advertisment was handled already, or was it in another thread? Anyway, that brown radio is not Beolit 39, it's Jet 505K, built after the war. Not quite as rare.

Edit:

Thank you for letting me know, I should have known that the community would have discovered this long ago....

Maybe the seller does not want to read the particular email he was sent 🙂

Sverre

Long time passed and not a lot was done to this project for different reasons.
I've had two consecutive water damages in my repairshop that forced me
to evacuate the rooms. First one was "just" 4-5000 liters, second time is not
clear but it was considerably more since noone was at home when it happened.
Moving out is quite a task but luckily I keep everything on shelves so
no B&O things, instruments etc got damaged.
Still, it will be at least until the end of the year before the workers
have finished repairing ceilings and floors and before I can move back in
I'm left quite disabled.
Anyway, I have now set up an emergency repairshop at home with just a
small amount of tools and instrumentation to just do the most common things.

It's not all bad though, as it does leave time for other things, such as locating
a proper volume control potentiometer with a push/pull switch that is on when
pulled out and off when pushed in and this was exactly what I managed to find.
It had the same problem with the too short shaft so I had to repeat the job
of shaft extending. Another cheap modern potentiometer donated its plastic shaft
and with two-component epoxy and a piece of plastic tubing the result is
once again very good.

Martin

Valves are generally long-lived but unlike transistors and diodes, that usually
either work or not, valves get worn with use and gradually loses emission.

With this in mind, I would like to replace the frontend valve, in this case a CCH2.
The CCH2 is actually a quite rare valve and finding one would normally be a bit hard
but I was proved wrong; I put up a local ad and only a couple of weeks later I
had a nice looking CCH2 valve in my hands.
It was fitted and it provided for a huge change in that the dial now is filled
with stations, mainly on medium wave but there are a few on long wave and ...
*sigh* ... silence on short wave.
Anyway, it does give me something to work with - as if I hadn't enough already -
and the general motivation rises.

As the sound was still fairly low in volume, a longer antenna was tried.
15 feet of lead was put up across the ceiling. It gave better results in the
form of more stations - still none on short wave - but the volume remained the same.
Since the output valve is brand new out of the box, no doubt I will have to
look into the IF amplifier and eventual AGC control to get this right.
The IF amplifier valve in this set is an EF9. The service manual and the lettering
on the chassis asks for an EF5.
EF5 and EF9 are quite identical in most aspects and in most cases an EF9 would be
a fine substitute but the EF9 has a few more "adjustables" that noone thought of
when the Beolit 39 was constructed.
A brand new, shining red, Tungsram EF5 was fitted which brought a bit more
volume. The radio can now play at a pleasant livingroom level but only with the
volume control at its highest setting.
It plays fine and with great continuity, no crackles after the output valve
had it's pins cleaned and the tonecontrol seems to work too, adjustable from
clear to mumbling.

Best thing is that it seems the dial is still nicely calibrated with tuning
in to the stations and countries marked on the dial having their mother
languages reproduced accordingly.

Photos will be attached later...

Martin

Hi Dillen

can you check the output transformer? -does the circuit data sheet give ohmic values. sometimes the primaries burn out through layers but are still intact. does it get warm? 

Is there an old capacitor 'leaking' your AF power away? 

Do the IF transformers iron dust cores look like they have been moved?

 if you don't have shortwave check the wavechange switch and coils/trimmers 

Thanks for your comments and suggestions.

I am very tempted to buy the output transformer theory.
The transformer works in that it passed signal from my
signal generator to the speaker but if the impedance is
correct, that's a different story.
One of the things I didn't check when I had my own
Beolit 39 down for comparison.

Anyway, to explain briefly what can happen;
The output valves grid coupling capacitor isolates DC
from the output valves grid, allowing only AC (programme sound)
through.
Any DC here from a leaking capacitor will keep the output valve
constantly driving current.
Even if the output valve will handle this for a short time
without being damaged (unlike a transistor-based amplifier that
would be destroyed almost instantly), the output valve will eventually
be damaged and lose emission.

What further supports the theory is that the output valve grid coupling
capacitor is this little fellow:

Martin

It may not be obvious to everyone, but this type of mustard colored
capacitor was heavily used in the late 50's and up through the 60s.
It was definitely not around in 1938 so it must be the result of
a previous repair.
No surprise since the original capacitor in this position would have
been a wax-paper type and it would have started to leak many years ago.

So we have the following scenario of this Beolit 39 coming in for repairs.
The "repair guy" finds the bad capacitor and replaces it.
It cures the fault but leaves the set very quiet because of the
output transformer that got toasted by the high DC current delivered
by the output valve.
Unable to diagnose this fault, he removes the volume potentiometer
and bridge it (and the power switch) to get maximum volume (which was
not much with the mounted valves).

During my repair process, I found the output valve no good and replaced it.
I checked the coupling capacitor and was quite happy with the mustard
colored type which is an extremely reliable type.
But . I didn't check the impedance of the transformer, only that it was
passing signal in some form.

I will check the transformer as the next thing, I may even want to compare it to my own.

It's not running hot, even after 2 hours of playing and the service sheet does mention some ohmic values...

Martin

Sorry to hear about your water leaks Martin.🙁 Great to see you are working on this project again though.😕

Craig🙂