Sometimes, spare parts for machines can be found by connecting with other collectors through clubs, antique magazines or online, Eng added. Knowing that the local electronic stores would not have the piece he needed, Eng decided to make a new one using a screwdriver and a clamp he rigged together to manually wind the new wire. An old coil wire inside was the problem and needed to be replaced, Eng said. When you restore it, you realize that something that’s been dead for 50, 60 or 70 years is now back to life.”Įng remembers assembling his own makeshift tool to fix a radio with a broken speaker years ago. “When you pick these things up in their beat up shape, you just want to take it. “This is where they go before they end up in a landfill somewhere,” Eng said. It was a quest that involved numerous trips to garage sales and swap meets. Refusing to cut the Packard Bell’s life short marked the beginning of Eng’s 40-year adventure in saving dozens of other gadgets from entering landfills. “My teacher said it’d be taken and put into a junk heap,” Eng said. The radio from Packard Bell, established in 1933 in Los Angeles, lived a long life before Eng found it.
“This one was cool because it had stations stamped into the dial.” “I was in a vocational program where a lot of our teachers would rip things apart just to try and fix them,” said Eng, who also has dozens of TVs in his collection. The first radio the retired teacher and engineer took home was a Packard Bell model he discovered as a high school student in the early ’70s.
#RCA VICTOR RADIO WITH BELL FULL#
The fair’s Collections building, located next to the Millennium Barn, features a case full of Eng’s devices acquired over the years, including clock radios from the ’50s and handheld radios in an assortment of colors. He sees them as they were in their heyday.
Looking at the colorful plastic knobs and dials, Eng does not see what some call “dead technology.”
#RCA VICTOR RADIO WITH BELL PLUS#
A single radio from high school was all it took for La Palma resident John Eng to hunt down the 28 radios now displayed at the OC Fair’s Collections - plus over 200 others in his home.
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