i know it's just a clock radio but hear me out because it's definitely rather quirky this is a
magnavox d3240 from sometime in the late 1980s and it's actually been in my family ever since
it was new it originally belonged to my older sister and then when she went off to college
it got passed down to me and i've kept it in my possession and used it ever since
it has a simulated woodgrain finish on the top and a large grille which does an excellent job of
collecting dust which i was unable to completely clear out and it's deceptively large because the
actual speaker is only here it's only about two inches in diameter and already we can see
some weirdness with the controls on top here it says functions control what does that even mean
like as if we wouldn't know these are the controls if they didn't point it out to us but you have
your typical mode switch for the radio and alarm but instead of sleep it says slumber
so they have these odd terminologies they use instead of the industry standard button labels
then you have the controls for adjusting the time and alarm but instead of the conventional
hour and minute buttons it has fast and slow so for example it's set 40 minutes past midnight
right now and you want to set it to like 5 pm you have to hold it down and just wait
until it gets up to the desired time and if you overshoot it you have to go all
the way back around again you do get a slow control but this this is one of the reasons
i'm making this video because i have to clean these buttons they're getting rather hard to
push i have to really push down on it to get to register so it probably has dirty contacts
and i figured if i'm going to be taking this thing apart i might as well do a video about it
but you do get a slow time advance if i can even get it to register that's your slow
minute by minute advancement then you get another one for adjusting the alarm and it
works the same way and again instead of what everyone else calls a snooze button
with or without the e on the end it says repeat alarm slumber off so that's your snooze button
then on the front it gets even weirder because it has your typical red
LED time display but there's no colon between the hours and minutes
i don't think i've ever seen another clock radio or alarm clock of any kind which didn't have
a colon and there it mentions the battery backup which it calls power back up
and then here on the tuning dial for the radio unlike every other analog tuning dial i've ever
seen it doesn't go by all even numbers on fm it starts out pretty normal 88 92
but then it goes 95 99 103 i've never seen that before on a tuning dial for fm radio i don't know
maybe somebody at magnavox had favorite radio stations on 95 99 and 103 so they decided to
point it out on the dial the AM dial also gets a little bit weird because instead of
going by hundreds like 600 800 a thousand it goes 650 850 and then it goes back normal 1200 and 1600
and there's your tuning the pointer at the bottom with a log scale from 0 to 10 in case you don't
know the point of log scale is that if you found some unknown station and you're unsure of its
exact frequency you could write down where it is on this decimal scale from 0 to 10. so you can
say right now i'm tuned to 4.6 and you can log that down as the station's location on the dial
on the right you get the normal controls for tuning volume and am and fm band selection at
least that's totally normal here's the bottom it is UL listed and it's manufactured by
NAP which stands for north american philips because philips owned magnavox by this point
then here it refers to both hertz and cycles per second which was well obsolete by this
point pretty much everyone stopped using cycles per second in the late 1960s and early 1970s
then look at the door for the nine volt battery backup which it calls power backup
but also mains breakdown buffer that has to be the most british way of referring to i've ever heard
no one in america has ever said by jove i do believe there has been a mains breakdown
nobody in north america refers to the electrical supply as mains and inside that battery
compartment it looks like you originally had a sticker saying use only carbon zinc batteries
it looks like someone forgot to inspect it at the factory but nonetheless is still working
and sometimes when you plug it in after a power failure
and you don't have a battery backup instead of just flashing 12 o'clock
like every other clock radio it alternates between 12 o'clock and 12:01
here's the inside and i can see why those buttons are so hard to push they're attached to a piece
of foam which of course has degraded with time it's not quite falling apart yet but you can see
especially these buttons when i push on it the foam actually splits apart
so that's gonna need to be replaced i have a slightly thicker piece of foam i can replace
it with it's interesting that the speaker was actually made by pioneer it's 8 ohms 0.2 watts
and i think that's the date code 8524 so this was made in 1985. here in the base the circuitry looks
pretty old-fashioned especially the way they put wax to glue some of the components in place
the clock chip is a national semiconductor mm5456n also with 1985 date code and that
looks like the radio tuner chip tea5570 and i noticed it has a sticker identifying the am
tuner's intermediate frequency of 455 kilohertz i believe that's the audio amplifier but it's so
buried in there and glued in i can't identify it
here are the switches in the base that those buttons push down on some of them still have
a nice clicky tactile feel but those two that are getting rather hard to push they don't have
much of it left they still work but definitely getting rather worn out i'm going to try spraying
a very little amount of electrical contact cleaner in those switches you definitely
don't want to overdo it sometimes i see people really hosing down controls of this stuff like
and it just makes me wince because they're putting way too much of it in
this can actually has adjustable spray i'm gonna put it all the way on low
just a little amount
these i can really just drip them in because they don't need that much those top ones are
are not having trouble like the lower ones and now just
work them in i forgot this one down here but that one didn't have any trouble either so just
drip a little bit in that and just work at these buttons a little bit i'll put some in this switch
a little too much but that kind of switch can take it
the contacts are bigger compared to these little touch sensitive buttons
and even though they weren't scratchy while i'm at it i might as well spray the
volume control and the band selector
i cut a replacement for this degraded piece of foam out of this slightly thicker piece of foam so
i'm gonna glue that in place the replacement foam has been installed so hopefully the combination
of this and cleaning the contacts of those switches will help make those buttons work better
here's the first test before i screw it back together
one other quirk of this clock radio is that in order to get it to stop blinking 12 o'clock
all you have to do is hit the time set button you don't even have to change the time
just hitting that button cancels the blinking now for the fast time setting
works fine never really had that much of a problem to begin with but
now it works fine let's see about that slow time setting
yeah i still have to really push on it to get it to work
i might try wedging more foam in there to build it up a little bit higher but i think
that button is just worn out and same thing with the alarm setting you really have to push on it
to get it to register so i think those switches are just worn out from use over all these years
but there's a slumber or what it calls slumber what every other radio calls sleep
that's the AM radio tuner here's the fm tuner
"with high hopes and no expectations for the future and today's in the journey we bring
you now this hour of radio today from WBEZ chicago this is american life i'm ira glass"
it never really sounded that great but you can't expect high quality of a two-inch speaker
even if it was made by pioneer
okay that's the alarm the beep stays the same but the volume
is whatever you adjust the radio so if you want beep only you just turn down the volume
or you can choose just radio
"without the people at that point had been a movie star a star of early television"
and that's your snooze or what it calls repeat alarm
actually if i push on the buttons directly they're not that bad
there's that alarm setting button yeah it kind of takes a bit of force to get it to register but
it's not terrible so i'm gonna try doing is taking this extra piece of foam and putting
it on top of those buttons the two of those that are having the most trouble and see if that helps
actually there may be a little bit too much foam in there now because
as soon as i push on the time setting button it automatically fast forwards so that's no good
now what i did is cut off a little piece of this original thinner foam and wedged
that in there and now it's acceptable it works pretty good now so i'm happy with that i don't
really have to hammer on those buttons anymore to get them to press and these still work fine
"and they pre-showed"
everything works fine so now it's working about as good as it's ever going to work
now i can install the mains breakdown buffer battery which as it recommends is not alkaline
jolly good
"one night years later i was sitting at a restaurant in west los angeles
when i saw george come in"
i'll leave you to make up the rest of that story