Radiocraft is what happens when a restoration business retires but leaves the workshop notes online.
Visit Radiocraft’s vintage television archive
Stephen Ostler founded Radiocraft in 1986 to restore vintage radios for people who wanted to use them rather than merely display them. The business eventually expanded into early television, and the surviving website now functions as a record of decades of restoration work.
The site is especially good on British television before modern standards flattened the hardware into interchangeable black rectangles.
There are restoration pages for sets such as the 1937 Marconiphone 702, 1938 HMV 907 and 1951 Bush TV22. The pages discuss cabinet work, chassis condition, aerial connections, alignment, safety and the problem of operating receivers designed for Britain’s obsolete 405-line television system.
That last part is important.
An old television is not automatically useful just because the valves light up.
Restoring the signal around the television
Radiocraft explains that British vintage sets were built for a television signal that no longer exists in normal broadcasting.
The sets expected 405-line pictures and carrier frequencies from an earlier broadcasting system. To use one today, the owner needs more than an electronic overhaul; they need a way to generate a compatible signal.
This is a recurring problem in technology preservation. Hardware can survive while its environment disappears.
The site also preserves Ostler’s Retrovisor project, an attempt to solve a different problem. Between 1993 and 1995 he produced 48 modern color televisions inspired by the classic Bush TV22 cabinet. These were not replicas in the strict sense but contemporary receivers dressed in the visual language of postwar British television, with features such as remote control and on-screen display.
Radiocraft’s own history traces the idea back to studies begun in the late 1980s, years before “retro” became a default marketing category.
The restoration philosophy is equally specific. On rare prewar sets, Ostler describes trying to remove or hide later repairs so the finished object looks less like a restored antique and more like a carefully preserved original machine.
That is a difficult line to walk. Restoration can save a machine while also erasing evidence of its working life.
Radiocraft’s pages make those choices visible.
The business no longer accepts commissions, but the website remains useful because the old service pages turned into a technical archive by simply staying online.
Some retired websites become brochures for things you can no longer buy.
This one became a repair bench you can still lean over.