10. The Krijnen Collection
In the Summer of 1998, radio collector Piet Krijnen died of Rheuma.
Together with fellow collector Piet Hoen, here depicted in front of his
house, I went to the Krijnen residence in Maastricht to pick up the
radio collection.
The son in law had asked us to take away this material because it would
better go to other collectors than to the garbage dump.
In the house there was not only a radio collection consisting of some
sixty radios and parts, but also about 40 color-TVs and VCRs.
It was agreed that we would take away everything that had to do with
radios, keep what we wanted, and sell what we didn't want.
The money from the sale would be donated to the Rheuma foundation.
What we found
The state of most of the radios was a little bit disappointing: as Mr
Krijnen had been a radio serviceman during his lifetime, we had expected
all radios at least to work.
However, we learned that his illness had prevented the collector from
entering his hobby room for about five years.
Many radios were incomplete and, due to dust and moist, a lot suffered
from bad cracking; some even from smoking.
To our surprise there were no measuring instruments, not even a working
multimeter (there were two defective ones, though).
Appearently Krijnen had been in the possession of a magic Karma allowing
him to diagnosticize radios with his bare eyes and make solder
connections with his fingers.
We boxed everything, made a list of items, and also made pictures of
everything rightaway.
Because we don't have large warehouses, it was important for us to try
and sell a lot of items on short term.
Nevertheless, some of the items we found made us lick our fingers.
Piet was very happy to add, among others, the NSF M3 from 1926, depicted
here, to his collection.
Actually it didn't look like this then, but between the pickup and this
photo are several evenings of polishing and repair.
The tubes weren't there, but there was another box of tubes that was
swapped for the neccesary M3 tubes at our tube dealer.
If you visit Piet's
Pages (kept by his brother since Piet's death) you can see the two of us working on the piece.
The radio turns out to be not very sensitive, but some stations can be
heard.
I enriched my collection with the items listed on the right.
The Blaupunkt Paris was scrapped for parts, the Vendomatic was sold a
few months later, but the Philips BX200U
turned out to be nicely restorable.
The Music Board BX360 is quite special, too: it was among the first
models that came out after World War II, and to minimize wood usage the
radio didn't have a cabinet.
It was almost in good working order, I only had to replace a capacitor
and a tube to get a warm and rich sound out of it.
However, because I like to work on and play with radios, not just to
look at them, I exchanged the Music board later.
Sales and Donations
Many of the items we didn't want to keep were sold. A few of the most
valuable ones were even sold within a few days, so that at least we
could recover our costs from the sale. But the sale went on, and
finally when we closed our books on December 31, 1999, we could send a
donation of 300 guilders to the Rheuma foundation.
Gerard Tel