I purchased this Plano radio at a Het Goed store in Eindhoven for € 25. The dial and buttons were all in good order, and the wooden cabinet was in relatively good shape, despite the usual scratches. It looked in good enough condition for a sanity check, and when connected to a lightbulb tester, I could get FM reception.
After acquiring the radio but before starting the restoration, I moved my workbench from the bike shed to a proper workshop in the house. After setting it up in the new workshop, the radio stopped receiving. It would turn on and make noise, but no FM reception at all.
After checking voltages everywhere (they were a bit lower than expected, but nothing too dramatic), I started replacing tubes one by one using alternatives known to be working. After some work, I found out that the ECC85 (FM tuner) socket actually contained an ECC88 tube. I was surprised because ECC88 is not a suitable replacement for ECC85, and I cannot explain why the radio worked before and why it stopped working. In any case, the new ECC85 tube did the trick.
Next thing, the EM80 "magic eye" tube was barely visible. I replaced it by a brand new tube and voilà.
I moved on to recapping. This radio had almost no paper caps, but about ten electrolytics that had to go.
I now had a radio with FM reception and new electrolytic caps. However, I could not tune to my favorite station, Sublime FM, which transmits at 89.7 MHz. I found that the dial was badly misaligned, off by some 10 MHz.
In order to perform the FM dial alignment, I bought and restored an Eico 324 Signal Generator.
However, something went wrong during FM alignment. One of the slugs (S59) broke while I was turning it, exactly the same problem seen on one of David Tipton's videos.
Due to the broken tuning coil, I have given up restoration on this radio for now (March 2022). Fixing that slug is beyond my current abilities, so I will park this radio. I may resume restoration if I feel up to it in the future, or I may use it as a parts donor. We'll see.
