[Milsurplus] Drown German?

[Hubert Miller]

Last March my brother and i were wanting to sell off a German Torn.E.b receiver. 
This was a 1944 version, HEAVY with the crappy zinc alloy Germany transitioned to,
for ground radios, starting 1943. A few years earlier i had given up on trying to extract
the radio from its cabinet. My brother tried out the usual; heat gun around the front 
panel edges; penetrating oil. Finally, i held the radio up in an inverted position while 
he dealt the back some blows with a block of wood motivated by a rubber mallet. 
However, the chassis showed no movement. Well, eventually it did: the front panel
shattered; one whole corner disintegrated. Disintegration is a characteristic of this
zinc alloy. Military Trader magazine last year had an article on this disease, "zinkpest".
So the front panel is shot. The innards look okay; surprisingly enough, the 'spider' that
suspends the coil turret is intact; these are also zink pot metal and crack and fall apart
also. We found some interesting things about the Torn.E.b receiver. For example, some
inner shields were simplified and eventually eliminated as time went on. Also we wanted
to replace a knob on one model with a knob from the junker. However, the regeneration
knob shaft ( i think it was ) were two different diameters on the radios; he had to drill 
out the replacement knob a tad to make it fit. I have seen 1945 production of these radios
and they may look great, but in this year and 1944 they all have the DNA for this fatal 
disease. Besides, they are REALLY dense, heavy! even moreso than the notorious BC-312.
-Hue Miller