Eheh, yes, we (the radio and me) were lucky; it worked for a few years more.
A couple of years later I built a transistor based one from a kit. My first contact with soldering, resistors' color codes and components at a large. My knowledge about those items was absolute zero (and there was no Internet to help) but with patience and observation I assembled it correctly.
A challenge was to decode the color scheme used on resistors. No clues, just a circuit board scheme showing something like "place R12, 4Ohm, next to.."; how to identify R12 was up to me..