Zenith Z404L Carousel

 

Having a lot of projects in the queue, I've promised to buy no more old radios until all projects are finished. Then I saw this small Zenith portable radio with a leather case ;-)

Zenith Carousel Z404L

 

The Zenith Carousel Z404L Radio is a funny little thing in a case build complete of leather. It is a four tube design with the typical tube layout Zenith use in the early and mid fifties.

The radio is build for operating on 117VAC or VDC or from batteries. It has no Zenith Wavemagnet antenna but a standard ferrit antenna. I had mainly to clean the leather case with saddle-soap. This spends to 2 hours, but this procedure really cleaned the leather. The leather handle was broken on one side so I had to do some leather work ;-)

1U4 I.F.
1R5 Converter
1U5 Detector Amplifier
3V4 Power Amplifier

Chassis number is 4Z40L.

I got immediately by posting at Antique Radios a schematic and alignement instructions for the radio, dated from 1957: 4Z40 (.gif 168k)

The 4Z40L chassis in the testbed

and remounted in the radio:

Zenith used the same chassis also in a portable radio with a bakelite cabinet, the Z402F. Both radios, Z404L and Z402F, were featured in Zenith advertisements in 1956, so this seems to be the manufactoring year.

Back to my Zenith Trans-Oceanic and Companion page

Last update: 11/August/2003