"Phil Nelson" wrote in message
...
2. Have a local ham or TV repair shop check the units out:

Or simply sell them as-is and let the buyer do the restoration. Most
shoppers at the typical estate sale are not hams or "radio people" and may
not even recognize what these things are. Unless you find a way to
publicize your sale to some kind of radio community, you might not find
anyone interested in buying, period. Whether the radio works or not would
be immaterial to a shopper looking for glassware or collectible toys. And
a serious radio buyer would understand that every radio of that vintage
needs some routine service before being played regularly.

For what it's worth, I sold a very nice Hammarlund HQ-170C a couple of
years ago for around $200. Again, it's a pretty narrow-interest receiver.
Ham bands only -- no shortwave, no standard broadcast band, so it wouldn't
interest the general public unless you find a dealer who plans to resell
it on eBay.

Consult a tax adviser to find out if the estate would
benefit more by donating some or all of the equipment
to a local ham club or school radio club.

Or radio collector club. Check the list at
http://www.antiqueradio.com/clublist.html to see if there's a club
anywhere in your vicinity.

To get a tax benefit from donation, you need to be able to verify the fair
market price of each item, and also make sure that the organization
qualifies for tax-deductible donations (the organization should be able to
tell you).

You could also ask the club to notify their members that the sale is
coming up.

Regarding the tubes, if you can connect with a nearby club, maybe someone
there could stop by and eyeball the collection, to give you some rough
clue what they're worth. A lot of the tubes used in 1950s/1960s receivers
are still very common and not worth a heck of a lot, even if new. And as
noted earlier, radio servicemen were notorious for sticking dead or
half-dead tubes into the boxes after installing a new tube. So unless you
have a sealed box that obviously was never opened, you have to either
assume the tube is used, or go through the process of testing it.

There are earlier tube types, such as 45 or 1L6, that are worth more, but
of course they are scarcer. Most TV tubes are still available new in vast
quantities and worth almost nothing. But there are a few exceptions. If
you have a type 15GP22 color TV picture tube, I'd be interested in that,
for example, but they were scarce when new and few if any exist at this
time, outside of the original TVs that they came in.

Some suppliers, such as Antique Electronic Supply,
http://www.tubesandmore.com/ , do buy old stocks of tubes for resale. You
could get some idea of what yours are worth by looking at their website.
Of course, they would offer you a wholesale price rather than the retail
price shown on their site.

Regards,

Phil Nelson


If he has some audio tubes in there? He may be able to unload them rather
easily. 6L6, 12AX7, 6V6 etc...

BH