Saba Freiburg 11

Dieter,

The force of the motor against the hand movement is strong, so that is a good news.

About realignment, as you say it is very critical I will skip that... I dont want to try it and leave it worst than now. At least it is working, it is ok how it works now, so I declare the restoration finished!

I bought 12V and 6V small bulbs. The 12V one didnt work nicely, the 6V one worked perfectly! Same illumination than the original 8.5V. Why? Because it is 6V 55mA! They get a small current flow (only 55ma against more than 100ma from the original ones) so the luminic intensity is similar.

I also finished re-doing the ferrite antenna wires to the knob. I added an external swith on the power cord (a very old german Leitz-Wetzlar switch from a projector) to leave always off the small transformer from the 220VAC line when I am not using the radio.

Before all that I will start moving around the house with the cabinet trying it in different places to see where it fit better.

DIETER, thanks a lot for your continuous follow up and tips. Apart from one more person that also send the schematics, the other members didnt help me. I know I can not write German so I am using the translator... I feel discriminated

Anyway I am grateful to this forum for having the chance to post here and for keeping such good threads with other restorations.

These are the components I had to replace (the two diodes, the rectifier bridge, two lamps, two resistors, all the underside electrolitic, paper and brown caps):





Bye for mow, untill the next German radio!

Dieter,

I wanted to make a joke but it seems like language barrier and difference in cultures made me fail. I am not blaming anyone, the other way around, I am abusing posting in the german section of the forum

I am now cleaning the cabinet, putting back the fragile glass (the paint is falling appart), cleaning buttons and knobs as well.

One of the big knobs has the big brass ring missing, and the two small ones the two round plates missing... I wish someone around had some spare ones, they fit in an envelope hehe.





Thanks again. I am SO happy!!!

Around 30 years ago, I found inside of an abandoned car, the chassis of a Nordmente radio and the turntable, both coming from a console furniture. Trying to avoid my mom's complain, I left the record player and brought into the house the radio. Last year, after 30 years of having found it, I decided to do something with it and I put it inside of a furniture I adapted from different parts of wood I also found This is what it came out:



I put inside a 12" woofer, also mid and tweeter with a frequency divider. The quality of the sound is amazing!

European radios here are scarse and incredible expensive... A few years ago I was in Frankfurt. In the saturday flea market there was a beautiful Saba from the 50s... Huge, gorgeous. I had to let it go, impossible to bring it on the plane safely. I wish I lived there.

PD: Yes, I am Normende but not Nordmende for copyright reasons

Hi Peter!

Thanks a lot for the link and for the nice wishes
I will check the link to see what I can find there.

Guess what? It almost always happens...

I finished putting the chassis back in the cabinet, I moved it from the kitchen to the living room, and guess what? There is a microphonic effect!

This was not happening before.... Maybe a tube is receiving the vibrations from the motor, the sound from the speakers, and even a hit on the front glass from my finger. Strange.

And also something else, the auto tuning system was running freely and working perfect in reverse, skipping some stations in forward. Now, in reverse slow it almost doesnt move.

So, I will have to take the chassis out again and see what is happening!!! It is so heavy that the only idea of moving it again out of the living room exhaustes me.

Here it is!:



Bye for now, it seems like it will not be a "bye until the next german radio" this time hehe.

Peter,

I tried and tried and I couldn't solve the issue.
I opened a thread in english in the proper section, but nobody replied.

So I quit. I spent a lot of time trying to find the problem, and also the radio is very heavy to keep moving it around.

I will use it manually. Unfortunately.

Thanks for everything.

FIXED 100%!!!! I want to share with you what the problem was, just in case this will happen in any of your radios because it was a strange problem.

Yes, I am stubborn.

I looked for the service manual online of the Freiburg 11, I couldn't find it, but I found the one for the Freiburg 15. It has a very detailed description about how the automatic tuning works. I studied all that was described there, took out the chassis and started measuring and analizing. It was easier than I though, I just needed the explanation

I found AC voltage of around 50VAC on the grid of the penthode section of the ECL80. Not pressing any button, and with one station correctly tuned no AC voltage should be there.
I took out the EABC80 to determine if the problem was coming from the discriminator or not. Surprise: the AC voltage was still there.
Where was it coming from? The grid of that tube is supposed to receive AC voltage only when pressing the search or forward buttons, and they were measuring open..... In idle mode there should only be DC there and anyway the AC voltage aplied when pressing the buttons is much lower.
I started looking from where it was coming and voile:

In the autotune on/off switch there are several cables connected to it. For example, in one end of the contacts of the switch, the 220K resistor used to discriminate from search or forward functions is mounted there. The next contacts are the ones connected to the coils of the motor (the ones through the .3uf capacitor in series). THERE WAS A DEPOSIT OF A KIND OF CARBON ON THE PERTINAX OF THE BODY OF THE SWITCH which was linking the line of the 220k resistor (which goes to the control grid of the penthode on the ECL80) with the AC voltage applied to the coils of the motor. This carbon deposit (I guess it formed over the years after sparking a lot of times) had a conductive resistance of around 1kohm! I just scrapped it out with a tool and that was it. Infinite resistance between the grid of the tube and the AC voltage of the motor.

I tested the radio and it works very well in both directions!!!!! The cut-off the EF86 is not very good, I don't know if it is supposed to be like that (just reduce a little bit the volume while searching) or it should be a real cut-off with complete silence.

facebook.com/video.php?v=10153…684&l=8407075935545644159

Because this AC voltage was applied to the grid, the motor was all the time moving forward not stopping in any station. It seems like the phase of this AC voltage was coincident with the one needed to move forward (it could have been in backwards too). The voltage was very strong, around 50V, compared to the 17V applied when pressing the buttons, so it took over the functioning of the motor randomly (I guess the resistance value of this carbon deposit was changing according to a lot of factors, even mechanical factors because the radio worked almost correctly before I assembled it and after I put it in the chassis it started failing until it crashed completely and was not working in reverse mode at all and was moving forward all the time even when reaching the stop switches at the end of the dial):



The microphonic effect tha appeared (very annoying by the way) was caused by one of the EF86 tubes. I just replaced it by another one that I had, and I also added shielded metal tubes to both of the tube as the chassis was prepared for that and in mine they were missing.

The only things left to check out is that in the AM section the auto tuning stops a little bit away from the perfect tuning of the stations. I know that this can be easily corrected by adjusting a bit one of the coils in the discriminator but I was warned to not touch at all other coils there. I don't know which holes are the ones through which I can access to the right coil, so for now until I can find the information I will leave it like that.

The other thing is that AM is very noisy. I can notice a 50/100hz noise in the background. I replaced all the caps, including the one in parallel with the rectifier.... I don't know where it can be coming from. At home there is no source of such interference.

What I did was to add high frequency tweeters to the sides. I am a purist, so I do only reversible things, so if in the future I regret, I just take them out. These tweeters gave the radio a lot of life!!! I put them between the cloth and the loudspeaker:





Ok, I hope my case was useful at least for one of you. If this is a common problem in these radios, please dont let me know because I would think that nobody wanted to help me and I will start to cry (local sense of humor).

Dieter,

It seems like years and years of connecting and disconnecting the motor through this switch generated sparks that were depositing slowly carbon that linked these two contacts.

Do you know where I can find which hole on the discriminator holds the adjustment I should change to make the automatic tuning system stop exactly in the center of the station carrier?

Yes, the first one is tapped...

I will check the thread and be extremely precautious when touching any of the adjustments.

There is still a small problem: In FM, when searching to the left it works great, and when searching to the right it skips some stations that were detected when looking to the left.

Someone in 2010 had the same problem, but unfortunately there were no answers on the thread:

foundcollection.com/2_b41c7d52917760a0_1.htm

Thanks a lot Dieter!

I will never stop saying that I ADMIRE so much the German engineers that designed in the 50's and 60's (even until the mid 70's) such advanced radios with special features and superb quality, with also a very beautiful design (specially Grundig, according to my personal taste). You must be so proud of being Germans!

I adjusted the discriminator. It works much better.
AM stops in every single station left and right, and the auto tuning is stopping exactly where it should, in the center of the carrier of each station. The strenght of the dial knob against my hand when I try to move it away from the tuned station is very high.
FM same thing, except that still it does not stop in every single station to the right but it is much better than before the adjustments. I should keep trying to adjust the stop screw, I didn't want to move it far away from its original position but I will give it a try.
So basically I consider the radio fully operational!

Thanks to all and sorry for not being able to speak German. I tried the google translator from German to Spanish and it works terrible, I guess same thing happens translating from English to German so at a certain point I thought it was nonsense to keep posting the result of the translation from Google, it should be irritating for you to read that

Thanks a lot Peter for your help!

I've been checking after your link the other spares that can be found on eBay Germany for these radios... Amazing! Almost everything is there!

I wish I lived there to buy the remote control (absolutely unknown here) and the back cover too...

If any of you is planning a vacation in South America, you are welcome to visit me for a tea and cookies or a nice dinner if you come with the remote control hehehe!