Grundig FR-200 Emergency Radio

Send Grundig a Email...they are usually quite good at responding to questions about their products.

I got mine open in an attempt to make modifications... Seems like there is a screw beneath the label on the back, or something like that. Right in the very middle of the back, I seem to remember. Will try to check later on today and confirm, if I can. If I am right, you have to punch through the lable with your philips screwdriver, and permanently damage the lable (or it least that's what I think I remember.) It definitely will come apart, you just have to find all the screws.

Hope this helps. Sorry for the vagueries.

Dave

Confirmation: the last screw is under the label showing which freqs are covered by the tuner, in the very center on the back of the radio. Just poke around with your philips screwdriver, and it will punch through the label before seating into the screw. This pretty much destroys the lable as a source of information, but that's where the last screw is.

Good luck...

Dave

Thanks. Using a flat screw driver, I was able to peel off the label without damaging it, so I can just glue it on again later. I unscrewed the last screw and had no difficulty opening the radio. I think I see what the problem is: the handle turns a gear (call it A) which engages another gear (call it B) which turns another gear (call it C) which turns another gear (call it D) which sits on the shaft of what I think is the generator. Gears A and B are made out of plastic, while gears C and D are made out of metal. I can't see very well what is going on with these gears, but I think one of the teeth of gear B either broke or wore out, so that it no longer gets driven by gear A at that point. I tried rotating gear B a little with my finger and then I had no trouble driving the gear train by turning the crank, but then it gets to that broken tooth and won't drive gear B any more.

There doesn't seem to be any way to remove the gear train or replace any of the gears. There are a couple of screws in part of the metal frame of the generator. They screw into the housing of the lamp unit and are probably intended to give greater stability to the gear train, but unscrewing them doesn't do anything to help one remove the gears.

It occurred to me that one way to deal with this is to construct another gear train unit using another generator and just replace the connections to the board from the old generator by connections from the new generator. I'm clueless about the parts I need for this, including the characteristics of the generator part that has to feed the printed circuit board, and also where they are sold.

A variant of this idea is to instead construct another gear train and connect it to the generator that is already in the Grundig, either by removing it (if that is somehow possible) or by positioning it so that it engages the gear of the generator. In that case I just need gears and a way to position the gear train, but that's not electronics.