New Old Stock Police Cruiser P-69-18 !
Never taken out of the box since 1945...
These are photos of an amazing discovery, a never used, still new-in-the-box Police Cruiser P-69-18R receiver, manufactured in early 1945, found by Tim Dobbs of Chico, California at an estate sale in early 2010.
Tim reported that there were actually two of these sets available at the estate sale where he acquired them, but he was only able to acquire the better of the two.
This receiver was originally purchased for use on the common northern California police common frequency of 1682 KHz. One possible reason that two of these receivers, delivered in 1945, remained unused is that this channel was abandoned in 1946 when most (all?) of the major northern California cities and counties switched to VHF FM during the first wave of license approvals granted by the FCC after World War II.
This example is the "R" model, i.e. P-69-18R, meaning "rear" (trunk) mounting. It was shipped with the extension cable to allow controlling the volume all the way from the dashboard mounted control head to the radio box in the vehicle trunk. The "speedometer" style cable can be seen in the photo below, along with the rubber covered cable which brought the power and speaker audio lines up front. The pieces next to the control head are noise suppressor capacitors and resistors to be installed at various points of the vehicle electrical and ignition systems.
The carton with the cables and suppressors:
As opened
:
The outside carton:
The receiver itself:
Here's a close-up of the antenna trimmer tag in the upper left of the front cover:
The control head. A bushing with setscrew attaches to the flexible-shaft cable and that cable connects to the body of the receiver and works the volume control potentiometer, which is located on the receiver chassis itself. The SP-1 modification of this receiver changed the volume control to a more conventional electrically operated design rather than this rather "Rube Goldberg" mechanical arrangement.
The speaker. The housing for this style of speaker is just a thick, pressed cardboard, and probably explains why so few have survived. There is a threaded stud which allows this style housing to be mounted to the firewall or the ceiling area of the vehicle. Later versions of this speaker were painted gray and contained the red Motorola logo in the center, with a plain, light beige flocked grille.
Close-ups of the other tags:
Ver. 10-17-2014 ©Geoffrey C. Fors 2010 All rights reserved