Antique Headphones with Broken Electronics - Restoration

In this video I’m restoring a pair of antique German headphones. I’ve found these headphones at an online auction for $30 and I thought they look pretty cool for a restoration project. Unfortunately they didn’t work anymore. I measured the coils and three of the four were broken. That fact put this little project to a whole new challenge. It required a ton of research to completely understanding every single detail of its function to remake the coils and such. After some trial and error I managed to remake the broken bobbins and rewind the coils. The tricky part was that both coils are connected with eachother at the beginning of the windings in the core. I had to make a special jig, so I could clamp both coils when winding the second one. The original paint had some kind of a structure in it. It was black matte with some kind of a hammertone pattern. Unfortunately I was not able to find such paint, so I went with regular black matte. To not loose the were fine writings and logo I only applied a very thin layer of primer and coat. The Bakelite pieces just required some wet sanding and a good polish and they looked like new again. Old Bakelite might contain asbestos, that’s why I wet sanded them so there won’t be any sanding dust. I cleaned the membranes with scotch brite after a 24h bath in rust remover. To get rid of the pitting I sanded it with 240 grit sandpaper. I was already down to from thickness, but there was still pitting visible and I just sanded one side. To get the best possible sound at the end I decided to remake both membranes with new steel foil. To match the original membranes I also painted the center black matte. I nickel plated all the screws and the two brackets like they were originally. The brackets were a little bit weird, because they were two identical ones instead of pair of mirrored ones. I fixed that pretty easy by just bending the shaft on one ion the opposite direction. I was very lucky that the cable was in nearly perfect condition. It had absolutely no visible damge or fraying, just lost a bit of color. I just had to shorten them. Todays headphones all work with AC, these however back then worked with DC. Therefore the polarity matters. I also marked all endings of the cable with red and black threads, so did I made a red and black plastic cover for the plugs. In the end I’m very happy how these headphones have turned out. The color combination of the black matte with the shiny black Backelite parts look very classy together with the shiny nickel plated parts and the crispy clean looking knurling is the cherry on top. I hope you like my work and the video. Huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters and especially to: Adel AlSaffar Alex McGeorge Alfonso Baz Alistair Moor Amar.k Anthony Eufemio Arron Metcalf Arthur Bendurion Brenna Redpath Chris walter David Barker Edward Conway Embiss Haitham Al Zir isaac james lowe Jean Ceppi John Shebanow Josh Denny Josh Ledford Josh Wasserman Joshua Bentley Joshua Scher Kar Marsten Lambda GPU Workstations LordPi Mellissa Marcus Monte Gibbs Nathaniel Carver NoLoneSurvivor Pat Thrasher Peter Riddett potokslow SophieHDLM Steve Bothe StevenVR Tyler Carruth VaushVidya Vickie Bligh Vince Valenti Will Black Xavier Carbel Yale Baker Yuri Zapuchlak Adam Holtzclaw Alipasha Sadri Andrew Egerton Andrew Phillips Arni Bjorgvinsson Bonnie Williamson Brian Hoerl Chad Bryant Charles Copenhaver Crystal Cash Damien Fuller-Sutherland Daniel Trejo Daniel Varga Dave Hardware David Ebert David P Hruska David Powell Endless Mike Grant Daniel Haley McFadden Hard_Boiled Jack Curry jake meckley Jason Koi Jeff Smith Jeremy Cole Johan Vergeer Joël Franusic Ken Rosso Kevin Robinson Kurt Gazow L Rlta Liam Rafle Lina Machina Marc Cerisier Marc Staedelin Mary Casella Mellissa McConnell Micheal Bier Michael Lamp Mossy_Forrest Nik Pasacal Schmikal Peter Cyprian Rebecca Miller Regis Vincent Rob Robert Galyen Sarah Langlais Scott Marshall Stefan Kronander Steven Michalcewicz Suiros Svenja Kuckla Thanny Tim Holt Tom Wallace Trevor Kam Tucker Ifft Victoria Emmenegger William My camera: Panasonic HC-VX11 This is an ASMR style video. Especially made to have the best sound quality, so you can enjoy all the authentic sounds created in the workshop in ASMR style. If you have any questions about the process, machines i’m using or other stuff, just ask me in the comments. I read them all and i try to reply as soon as possible. Sorry for my bad english, it’s not my language. I try my best to improve my technical english. Subscribe for more of my content. I’m uploading videos about mechanical stuff, as new creations and buildings and also restorations. Thank you for watching :-) „I make a new one“ T-Shirts: My Main Channel: My Second Channel: My Patreon Page: