Thursday afternoons me and a couple of the neighbourhood gents meet for beers (or bourbon)

, to discuss the world's problems, and who is causing them

.
Yesterday I brought the faceplate for an PRC-77 I bought off flea-bay to triumphantly show off the 3/16"x32 domehead fasteners I'd located way across town. The host is working fine artist, and he is examining the faceplate and we're talking about the next steps. Hold on he says quietly, and disappears inside. Out he comes with a cobweb covered PRC-77 complete! No innards, but externals all there. There was an old fashioned telephone handset wired in somehow, but for appearances it is a prop radio - just like I've been struggling to reconstruct. He got it for some art piece he was working on once upon a time. The muse left him, and it went into the store room for a couple decades.