...

That advertising may have been driven by a mistrust of a new fangled, and in the public's mind, an unproven technology. They probably are correct though in that a conventional chassis may not suffer all the problems with tube sockets as PC board sets had.

Anthony
PS According to the date on that, I was negative 6 months old at the time (was still in the oven).

:puke: Thats the same blasted chassis I was moaning about in my Space Command Frustration posts a few months ago. I has to put that one to the side. Never did get anywhere with the thing with darn near a complete recap. Maybe they should have went with the printed circuit because I got no satisfaction out of that idea. I will be realistic and admit that it is not that I have a poorly manufactured product but like what automechanics has also become I am using a parts changing aproach to fixing a problem with a marginal amount of knowledge and equipment. Like many collectors I dont own a shop or have a lot of equipment and I never worked as a TV repairman in any decade much less the 50s. In most any set there is one or two components causing any given problem. The knowledge and ability to weed out those items quickly would be nice as opposed to the limitations of trying to use an ohm meter in search of bad resistors and capacitors.:dunno:

...

I have a commercial from the mid-50s with Betty Furness touting the Westinghouse TV with a printed circuit board. Their term for it was "precisioneered."
There's a great shot of the neat circuit board then the "old fashioned" chassis with loose wires flopping all over.
Subtle.:D

Subtle like a heart attack!

Anthony

What manufactures did with PC boards seemed to be all over the map in the 1960s. Zenith did not use them at all. RCA used them for the lower power tubes, such as the IF, Video AMP etc. while mounting higher power tubes on the chassis. GE (and sometimes Philco) placed every tube on a PC board-Bad idea.

I did work on a RCA roundie color TV with a carbon trace problem on the PC board once, but their idea of using the PC board for the low power tubes seemed to work pretty well. In fact I have two 1962 portable B&W RCA tvs built this way that I watch regularly.

However, I have some small GE B&W sets and only could barely restore two out of five of these as the Horizontal output tubes had charcoaled all of the PC boards. I am sure this caused a lot of headaches even when these sets were much newer.

Some of the higher priced tube GE color sets (19" and 23") used a real metal chassis along with circuitboards with the horiz. output, damper, flyback, power trans. etc. mounted on the chassis. These seem to be of a higher build quality than the Portacolors, b/w GE sets that have the Horiz. output on the circuitboard.

What gets me about the RCA sets is that at least on the older tube color sets they make no provisions for making chassis service easier. In order to remove the chassis you have to remove the tuner mounting panel and all the auxiliary control knobs, etc. as there are no plugs/sockets connecting the control panels to the chassis. Also there is no removeable bottom on the set, so you have to prop the chassis up and try to get the test probe or soldering iron down under there to work on it.

Those module sockets especially on RCA are a pain as they disintegrate and cause intermittents...I have soldered the modules in place to get rid of the intermittent connections.

One problem I have seen on some of the RCA and Magnavox sets is that the tube sockets sometimes disintegrate from heat. The circuitboard is OK, but some of the tube sockets use this cheap white plastic that gets destroyed by heat rather than the more heat-tolerant bakelite or phenolic.

So this sorta comes around to reinforce what I said and what Zenith claimed.....they built a superior chassis! Obviously they were far more labor intensive and costly to build but by the same token, they were built to last. All the more a pity what's become of them.

Screw you Goldstar. You should of allowed them to die an Honorable death.

Anthony

I agree! and on that note, has anyone noticed that there AREN'T any sets out with the Zenith logo? Also..... on some CBS movies and tv shows I would see the logo "HDTV brought to you by Zenith" Not anymore...... I watched that "new" Helter Skelter movie last week and saw "LC bringing you HDTV" which is Goldstar. So is the Zenith name done????? It's so sad that of ALL companies Goldstar was the one to buy the Zenith name. I don't think even Thomson (which got RCA) is as bad as Goldstar.....

I worked for a Zenith dealer TV repair shop back in the late sixties while I was in high school. They were proud of the fact that they carried a "quality" brand, but I recall that they also sold (not too many from what I remember) the "high end" Andrea product line which I distinctly remember being praised as "hand-wired". My recollection from the literature and the shop talk is that at this point in time, Andrea was the only manufacturer still utilizing this more expensive production technique and was marketing it for all it was worth.

Originally posted by jstout66
I agree! and on that note, has anyone noticed that there AREN'T any sets out with the Zenith logo? Also..... on some CBS movies and tv shows I would see the logo "HDTV brought to you by Zenith" Not anymore...... I watched that "new" Helter Skelter movie last week and saw "LC bringing you HDTV" which is Goldstar. So is the Zenith name done????? It's so sad that of ALL companies Goldstar was the one to buy the Zenith name. I don't think even Thomson (which got RCA) is as bad as Goldstar.....

That's a new one on me, although with all TVs being made overseas these days I guess I shouldn't be surprised. When did GS quit using the lightning-bolt "Z" stylized Zenith logo on its TVs? For that matter, when did CBS change the notice at the bottom of the screen at the beginning of its high-definition programs to "LG bringing you HDTV"?

What's next? Thomson doing away with the stylized RCA logo this year, next year, or...? (Magnavox chucked its decades-old shield logo, along with that wonderful raised block letters "Magnavox" nameplate some years ago, even before the company was bought out by Philips; GE still uses its logo from years ago, though, even though GE-branded sets, like RCAs, are made by Thomson.) If it comes to this (RCA ditching its logo and putting some name we never heard of on its televisions), I will be convinced we have seen the definite end of an era (although I suppose the era ended with a well-defined thump as soon as RCA, GE, Magnavox, Zenith, etc. closed their U. S. manufacturing plants and went overseas).

Thomson is nowhere near as bad as Gold Star, especially now that Thomson has licked the onboard tuner problem in its TVs by mounting the tuner separately from the main circuit board. How long will it take Gold Star to figure out and correct the many problems in its televisions, if they ever do? :dunno:

Originally posted by peverett
What manufactures did with PC boards seemed to be all over the map in the 1960s. Zenith did not use them at all. RCA used them for the lower power tubes, such as the IF, Video AMP etc. while mounting higher power tubes on the chassis. GE (and sometimes Philco) placed every tube on a PC board-Bad idea.

I did work on a RCA roundie color TV with a carbon trace problem on the PC board once, but their idea of using the PC board for the low power tubes seemed to work pretty well. In fact I have two 1962 portable B&W RCA tvs built this way that I watch regularly.

However, I have some small GE B&W sets and only could barely restore two out of five of these as the Horizontal output tubes had charcoaled all of the PC boards. I am sure this caused a lot of headaches even when these sets were much newer.

In the '70s I had a 1964-vintage Sears Silvertone 21" roundie (one of my neighbors in my hometown was throwing it out, which is how I got it). The chassis bore a striking resemblance to RCA's CTC12 (although the set was actually built by Warwick Electronics). Would you believe that nine years later (three years after I got it in '70), the video-output tube socket broke out of the video circuit board?

So much for circuit boards being made to last. I've been wary of sets with circuit boards (especially those cheap Japanese-built portables--I've had a few in my time--with the entire set except the tuner and control cluster, including the flyback, horizontal-output and damper, etc. on one large PC board) for years. These sets are extremely difficult to work on; if a tube socket breaks or the flyback cracks the board, etc. the set usually gets put out with the trash, and if the CRT goes--same thing. These sets were built cheaply to sell just as cheaply. The only circuit-board set I ever owned that lasted me more than a year or two (aside from my two color sets I have now and two 13" color sets I bought in the '80s) was a Zenith solid-state 12-inch b&w portable I bought new in 1978. That set lasted 22 years without a bit of circuit trouble and had a beautiful picture all that time; in fact, the only problem I ever had with it was when the detent mechanism of the UHF tuner broke and jammed the tuner on one channel. The same thing happened with my first new color TV, a 1980-model Zenith 13", but again, it never developed any kind of circuit problems; same with an early-'80s vintage Zenith with electronic tuning.