The Regentone DP3 is a small a.c/d.c mains valve radio, which was made about 1960/61. It has long & medium wave band reception, and has the following valves in circuit:-
UCH81, UBF80, UCL83 & UY85.
The radio had been fitted with the wrong control knobs (Philips type), and the cabinet had been painted green, but this had been chipped in places. The threaded pillars for securing the chassis to the cabinet had broken free from the cabinet - these were secured back in place using epoxy resin.
Then I tackled the cabinet, which had been cracked. This was repaired using superglue, and then afterwards was re-sprayed first with Plastikote White Primer paint and then with several coats of "Garden Green" colour.
The wood board that is mounted on the inside (removed before the cabinet re-spray) had also lost various speed nuts and pillars that secured it to the cabinet, and its speaker cloth had shrunk at the ends. I removed the old cloth and replaced it with some suitable cloth that I bought from Sid Chaplin. Since no one could supply replacement fitting clips or replacement cabinet pillars, I had to make a decision to apply contact adhesive between the board and the cabinet, this holding it firmly in place.
I had previously replaced all the plastic coated capacitors and the out of tolerance resistors, and replaced the UBF80 I.F valve with a UBF89 type (which worked much better). There was an awful crackling sound on both bands, due to the medium wave ferrite mounted aerial coil having multiple broken strands of wire. It took a long time to find a replacement coil, some people suggested using a coil from a transistor radio (minus the step down coil that would have connected to the transistor base terminal). This would probably have worked on more conventional valve radios, but not on this type. The dial is fixed to the cabinet, this would have to be removed and placed on the tuning spindle of the chassis (live components and possibly live chassis underneath), and then you would not have been able to fix it in place accurately for re-tuning. In the end, I managed to obtain a m.w aerial coil from a scrap Philips B2G81U radio, which worked a treat!
Also, earlier I was able to obtain some correct Regentone control knobs from a scrap record player (minus the "Brights") from a collector in Leeds. He knew of another person that could make the "Chinese hat" type knob brights, and eventually I obtained some of those too. The big problem was making the knobs fit the controls, the bespoke extensions were either broken or missing. The only solution was to remove both the wave change and volume + switch, and replace them with longer insulated spindles that did not require extensions.
There was another fault with the radio, the clip inside the ballast resistor had broken, but luckily there was a spare one available from a Bush DAC70 scrap radio.
The radio now worked and looked presentable, better than it was before! The chassis is the same as the DP2 radio, but their cabinets and fittings are as different again.