This may or may not have been beaten to death. Since I couldn't find much on a search I figured I'd ask. That and the what was your first new tv thread made me think of it.

So, anyways, I found mine at a Salvation army on 8-7-1995. It was and still is a 1968 Panasonic B/W 12". the vertical strecthes now when it gets hot but I think there are just a few resistors or caps changing with heat, but she still works. I almost threw it out but I think I should fix it back up like it used to be...just because. After all, that thing is what started my "obsession" as people have told me.

I was into radios since I was 7 or so. First antique radio that I ever had was a white Motorola AA5 set that I bought for $1 at an auction. Had bad filter caps and the thing motorboated like crazy. My mom's best friend's husband was an old TV and radio guy, and my mom baked him a chocolate cake for him to fix it for me. I came home from school one day about a month after I got it, and it was sitting playing in the dining room in the corner on the floor. I gave her the world's biggest hug. It was October 1978. I still have the radio.

From there, I amassed about 20 sets in my small bedroom, of various types. My first vintage TV, though, was a gigantic console Motorola b/w on legs. It had to have about a 25" tube. Had a huge M on the big bullet shaped control dial. I would so love to find one of those, haven't seen one before or since. My guess is that it was late 50s. Bought it for $5 at the same auction a year later. Used it for years, but got tossed when something was popping really bad inside, and I was too fearful to work on the thing. What the heck, I was 9 or 10 when it finally died ;) .

The next TV didn't come into my life until 1983. I remember riding my Free Spirit chopper from a friend's house a couple miles away (Christmas present in 1978), and got caught in a rainstorm. It was trash night, and I stopped under a tree until the rain subsided. I sat there, and my heart skipped a beat because I saw this salmon and white box under the tree. Honest to God I thought it was a prehistoric microwave, and was really excited because we didn't have one.

Looked at the front, and thought, holy crap, it's a television! I picked up the set, and rode home with it on my handlebars.

I opened the back, and there was one tube missing, a 7AU7 as I recall. I didn't have one, nor did I ever end up coming across one, until 1991. It sat on a shelf in the garage until then, covered carefully.

I was at a yard sale in '91, and there was a box of tubes, and the 7AU7 jumped out at me, and the memory came back. I bought the tubes, came home, put it in the set, turned it on, and what do you know, it worked! :D

The picture tube was somewhat dim, but I watched it for about a year or so, until it ended up getting packed away again in the garage until I moved into my house here in 1996.....actually 15 years ago today. I still have the set, and still have my old chopper bike that brought it home back in 1983.....

My 1st "Vintage" set was a Sony KV-4100 I got offa Da Bay about 10 yrs ago...been downhill ever since...(grin)

Nice one Sandy! And speaking of that hill, it's pretty steep huh?:D

Hey Tim, That radio story of yours is pretty darn cute!

[QUOTE=zenithfan1;3019941]Nice one Sandy! And speaking of that hill, it's pretty steep huh?:D



Boy-Hidee, ain't THAT th' Truth !! (grin)

Hummm.. I was always lucky since the Uncle had a TV repair sales shop, so I would have my choice of what was considered "junk" back then. However.. my first vintage set would have been a Zenith "porthole" console with doors that I got at a sale for $1.00 ( probably around 1979-1980)
I had it in my room, and I don't think the parents knew it worked (DIM picture tho), anyway.. whenever I would get grounded they would take my TV away. (the 79 Zenith) Sooooo... I would just watch TV on that late at night! I remember lot's of "Alfred Hitchcock".....

CTC17 combo. I was up in LA saw it on the curb had to make a u turn and pulled all the tubes out of it. I went back later that night with a pickup and got it. The cabinet is pretty bad, it even has cigarette burns and the owner cut the legs off. I use it as a workbench and watch it sometimes. It was in a very poor part of. Town and I think it wwas in use up till early 2000s

I started off with radios and really didn't have much interest in keeping TV's until a few years ago; but, I was given an RCA T100 10" round CRT B&W set by the president of our former antique radio club back around '90-'91. I never fixed it and ended up giving it away. By today's standards, the early '60's RCA B&W that I mentioned in the other thread as being the first TV I ever fixed would be considered "vintage"; but, it was just an "old junk TV" in the early '90's.

Some of my first TV's were a GE 12" B/W portable which was solid state except for the rectifier tube and a 1970's RCA 12" B/w tube type portable. I got these probably when I was around 10 years old in the mid-late 80's. The RCA pretty much got taken apart to pieces as it started to smoke when I tried to adjust something by using a hairpin. I still do have its cabinet somewhere though.

In 7th or 8th grade a friend of mine gave me a Zenith 4-tube hybrid 19" color set. I never could figure out how to get the color to work and ended up regrettably tossing the set.

I got an RCA CTC-31 probably around the time I was a freshman in high school. It was the 22" metal cabinet model. I persuaded my parents to give me $15 to buy it at the flea market and I carried it back to the car myself at the flea market. I can't believe I carried that thing for that distance. It later had a flyback fire but luckily it did not spread to anything else. I still have the cabinet of it, too.

I wish I could go back in time to the 80's to find old radios and TV's. My allowance I think was around 50 cents a week in middle school but I still managed to buy a lot of radios, 78 RPM records and some TV's. There were tons of radios at the $5.00 level I wish I could have bought but at the time for me that was a pretty big sum of money.

Mine was a Crosley 9-407 that I bought in 1979. It is a 12-inch set with a DuMont chassis that has the continuous Mallory tuner. I did not yet know how to fix it, so I sold it about a year later.

My first TRULY vintage TV was a 1977 Panasonic 12" Quintrix color set that my grandmother gave to me when I was about 15. Gorgeous little set, with a very crisp, bright, colorful picture, even after all these years.

FWIW, my first tubed set was a 1963 GE 11" B/W set with a built-in AA5 AM radio. The set is full of Compactrons. I still have it, and the TV section still works superbly, though the radio side has a bad filter hum.

My first vintage TV was a Indesit Black Wonder 24'' tube b / w when I was 12. Good set,but at that time we had very little space to store our sets and my father took him to a shed that was sold suddendly by the owner, RIP my dearly Indesit :sigh:

http://digilander.libero.it/france_53/indesit.JPG

Maybe the '73-'74 Philco_ford 9" I bought in 1998, but I certainly didn't look at it as a vintage collectible then - it was the only set in the thrift store that was small enough to sit on my dorm room's windowsill. Around 2004 my uncle gave me his Dad's '67 Zenith 12" B&W. The first one I ever bought was the '65 Magnavox 23" in 2008.

The first TV I ever had was a Silvertone 14 inch rectangular tube B&W tabletop in a sad little walnut cabinet. I worked after school at a local Radio and TV shop in St. Petersburg, Fl. [Translation: The owner let me hang out there and I took out the trash, unboxed new sets for the showroom and replaced 50/30@150 filter caps in 5 tube Superhets for customers waiting in the front. $6.88 for snowbirds to listen to their baseball games again.]

The Silvertone set was under a service bench in the far corner of the shop. I asked about it one day and was told, "If you fix it you can have it." WOW!!! For a kid of 11 this was a golden opportunity and a huge incentive to learn to troubleshoot. With the SAMS folder I started measuring parts under the chassis. Everything seemed to be OK and no obvious shorts. I finally turned it on and watched the tubes light up. Sound but no picture. I followed the B+ around through the set until I found a big wirewound resistor with voltage on one end and nothing on the other. Replacing that got the set closer to running but the best was yet to come. There was a full picture! Full of random horizontal lines and noise and the sweet smell of ozone. Another tech came over and switched off the lights and pointed at all the blue arcing
on the outer edge of the flyback. A new Stancor A-8131 was $7.60 so I decided I would try to repair the flyback myself. I removed it and pealed off the yellow wax around the outer edge and saw the burned spots with a magnifying glass. After removing the HV lead I stared pealing away the burned turns of wire until there were no more that I could see and I had continuity through the coil. I had removed almost 1/4 inch of the layered HV coil! Reattaching the HV wire was difficult but with care and some coil dope it seemed OK. Remounted it and reconnected it and turned the set on. WOW a clean clear picture! It worked! I had that set until my Jr. year of high school.
I could wear head phones and watch 'The Jack Paar Show' in my room without disturbing anyone.

I sold that set to a friend and found another TV at the shop that had been sitting under the bench for years. It was a Pilot TV-125, had a round 12 inch tube and included an FM tuner. This was the summer of 1960.

About that time I found the local parts distributor had two COL-R-TEL color adaptor kits that never sold to any of the local dealers, so I got one and the friend who got the Silvertone got the other one. We got them for $25.00 each! We made them both work, but the tales surrounding the COL-R-TELs are another adventure completely. Waaay tooo much fun for a kid.

Cliff

My first vintage tv was/is a 1964 Magnavox 24" B&W combo. It was listed on E-Bay as non working. I won it for a $5.00 bid.:scratch2: My fiancee(now wife) helped me pick up this monster in CT., on a cold,rainy night. The set is also remote controlled, and there is a switch on the back to let the set be operated manually. I flipped the switch, and the set came to life.:thmbsp: Attatched are pictures of the set, as it currently is.

Man, Magnavox sure made some pretty cabinets back then.

My fiancee(now wife) helped me pick up this monster in CT., on a cold,rainy night.

...and that's how you could tell she was a Keeper :D

My first vintage set was a Magnavox console too (mines color though), found it in a ditch off the highway of all places. Some of the best things in life are free. I've had people make offers on it but I just can't sell it.

1973 vintage 16 inch color zenith, with sc-100 single button remote control. Picked it up at a second hand shop in 1993. Between the remote control and the fact it used tubes, i had to take it! Someone had adjusted every single real panel control, so after a day of fiddling got it to display a nice picture. it's basically been in use more or less since i got it... Only the past few years it's needed attention. i have always opened it up every couple of years, to vacuum out dust, and admire the hand wired chassis.

Mine was that Zenith I mentioned in the other thread. 16" b/w tube set in a black plastic cabinet (early 70's?). It was an odd one, the controls normally on the side (vert/bright/cont) were on a copper-colored metal panel on the front right side of the set with the channel knobs and vol. I've never seen that exact model again.

That was in the fall of '85, in the next summer I picked up 3 more sets at garage sales: two identical 19" RCA b/w tabletop tube sets in fake-wood plastic cabinets (late 60's?), and a 1978 Zenith 9" b/w ss tv in a white plastic cabinet (I've recently picked up a red version of this set).

That summer I also picked up 2 radios: a mid-60s Zenith AM clock radio in a brown plastic cabinet (I picked up a white version of this radio last year), and a 1939 RCA plaskon table radio (which I still have).

...

The first old TV that I restored was this RCA 14-S-7070G tabletop.

http://antiqueradio.org/art/rca0901.jpg

In hindsight, a couple of the 1960s TVs that I watched in college and grad school would qualify as borderline vintage now. One was a briefcase style like a Seventeener, but I don't recall the manufacturer. I still have one of the others somewhere; it was missing the tuner knob, so I changed channels with a pliers.

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

I remember buying a mid'60s B/W console-Wood construction & all- & hauling it up to where we Shot, & Executing it...This was about 1984, it was just a Junky Old TV...We pulled the Tubes out, set 'em on top, & Plinked 'em off...We left it there, this was in the summer, by Thanksgiving, it had been shot at so many times, preciuos little remained that could be identified as a TV...

Like others, the first ones I had weren't "vintage" at the time. About '80 or so my aunt & uncle gave us a spare set they weren't using. It was for my sisters and I but it was in their room so I never quite claimed it. It was an early 60s GE portable, 19" briefcase style, one of the first to use Compactrons. A good set, actually. Eventually the tuning got too weak to pick up anything, I'm sure it was just a bad tube. I suppose it ended up in the trash at some point :( By about '83 another uncle gave me a set of my own. It was a late 60s GE table model, I'm going to guess a KC chassis or something like that, big, heavy metal cabinet 23v set. I had a love/hate relationship with it! It was a real poor performer in most every respect but it was at the same time very cool (to me). I complained about it so much that my Dad hauled it away; he told me it was going "to the woods" but one day a lunch lady at school (her son worked for my Dad) told me, with much joy, "I have your old TV!". I've often wondered if she still does! I'd sure like to have it back.

But, as I said, those weren't considered vintage to me at the time. That honor goes to this set: there wasn't much for this nerdy kid to do, living out in the country with no close friends. Most Saturdays I would ride my bicycle the 2 miles into town and browse around the antique stores. (well, it was that or the hardware store! Sometimes I'd venture into the TV shop-I should have hung out there more) Anyway, the largest antique store was/is in a big old 2 1/2 story building but only the first floor was open to the public, or so I thought. I'd probably been going in there for a year or more when one day somehow I figured out that the second floor was open, they just always kept the door closed. I wandered up and found the place stocked with some very cool stuff. As I neared the end of the row I spotted some furniture arranged just like a typical 50s living room, and guess what was at the center? A '54 RCA Victor 21" bw console! I had only seen pictures of sets like this and my little heart beat fast. There was no price marked so I rushed downstairs and was told $25. I had enough saved up and so, just like that, it was mine! Better yet, they agreed to deliver it between 3-4pm Monday, right after I got off the school bus but before my parents or my sisters were home! It was weeks before anyone knew about that set. The TV actually worked quite well. It did have "conehead" syndrome but back then I didn't know the first thing about replacing caps or anything like that. This all happened around '85 or so. I watched many an episode of Mr. Belvedere on that TV. Sometime in the early 90s I tried recapping it and afterwards it didn't work at all. The cabinet gotten pretty beaten up over the years and I'm not sure what I did with the knobs. But, there it sits, in the TV room. Someday I'll get it going again.

My first vintage set was an RCA 8-TS-30, picked it up at a Swap Meet just because it looked ancient to me at the time (early 80's?) some time after that I got a 721TS, funny I don't remember where that one came from but it was probably given or sold to me by my TV repairman friend I had worked for earlier.

1st ever, 1963 sears silvertone roundie color with a ctc12 clone chassis. ampico kid from the forum here found it in scranton pa, how i had missed it i dont know. but it was outside under a tarp because it was in the way in the garage and i rescued it 1 day befor a rain storm. as some of you guys here already know because i got alot of help regarding hv issues.

My first vintage set, IIRC, was an early1950s Capehart console. My great-aunt had just gotten a new portable TV, so she gave me the Capehart set. Worked reasonably well the short time I had it. It eventually quit several years later, but I saved the cabinet and converted it to a tool chest (this was decades before the Internet and VK). That TV was one of the very early '50s models with a round CRT (16GP4 I think) and perhaps a continuous tuner. This set also had a small box in series with the power cord (the box sat in the bottom of the cabinet, near the 12" speaker), which years later I found out was probably some sort of line voltage booster, for use in rural areas where the pole transformers were literally miles apart and where the AC line voltage often varied a significant amount from day to night, or vice versa. I lived in a suburb of Cleveland at the time with reliable electric service, so had no use for the booster, but since it was in series with the power cord I left it where it was (didn't seem to affect the normal operation of the set).

That Capehart TV was the first in a long line of vintage sets I owned in my life, most of which were trash day finds that almost always needed very little to get them working again, until I finally I had enough money to buy a new set. My first vintage color set was a 1964 Silvertone 19" roundie I got from a neighbor of mine in my hometown. The push-pull on-off switch on the volume control and the circuit breaker were bad, but once these were replaced the set worked reasonably well ... until one day in the early 1970s when the video output circuit board cracked (I've told the story many times here in VK) and put the set permanently out of commission. I didn't know much or anything about repairing PC boards at the time (though I did try, with no luck, to repair the cracked-out tube socket), so I trashed it and reluctantly replaced it with a 1961 Philco b&w, which lasted until I found another Silvertone (rebadged Toshiba) 16" color set, in a trash pile in my hometown, around 1975. That set was the first color set I ever had that actually worked as soon as I got it home, and was the second in a short series of color TVs I owned. The rest, as the expression goes, is history.

My first hobby TV (I can't say vintage, because it was a reasonably late model used set at the time)... A Magnavox 24" table model B&W in a masonite cabinet. Got it when I was 9, from a neighbor who was going to give it to the Goodwill, I still have it. My first vintage set (bought as a vintage set) was a '49 Hoffman 10" blond oak table model with doors. l got that in '77 (age 10) and I'd venture to say it was just about at the birth of "vintage or collectable" TV.

Charles

Well the first "vintage TV set" I had was the frist TV I have memories of watching. It was a Motorola WID set, which my inquisitive mind killed when I was very young, I proceeded to "take it apart" it years later.

I have a 1964 sony portable that was the smallest consumer TV in the world at that time. I bought it at a thrift store between when I was 9 to 12 years old(I moved then), and I just found that set after the move quite reciently. I was into radios then and did not see it as collectible untill reciently. I just bought it because it looked cool.
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/i469/ElectronicMemory/DSCN0740.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/i469/ElectronicMemory/DSCN0739.jpg

The first vintage set I bought as a vintage set is my 1958 GE 14T017 portable. I bought it at a FAWG meet around 6 years ago. I had seen it at some meets but it was either NFS or I did not get to it before the seller left. It seemed at first that they were getting it repaired, then gave up and let it change hands before it showed up at another meet, I inquired, and was given a offer I could not pass up.........I was offered that set not working, and a free flyback tester for 5$!
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/i469/ElectronicMemory/DSCN1321.jpg
It has great sound and NO HV. I haven't worked on it since my TV repair skills were in there infancy so I have yet to fix it. I reciently found it again, and acquired a red one so I should be able to make one or more working sets out of the two in the near future.
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/i469/ElectronicMemory/DSCN1320.jpg

My first TV was also my first vintage TV. It was a 21" (I think) Zenith B/W tabletop in a blonde woodgrain metal cabinet. I'm guessing it was 1955 vintage and purchased new by my grandparents. The picture tube had been failing, and even with a brightner on it, had to be watched in a dark room. Back then, people usually traded in their old TV's when they bought new ones, but my grandparents "gave up" the $18 trade in credit, and instead, gave it to me in 1966 as a Christmas present. I used it for a couple years until the picture got so dark it wasn't pleasant, and then stored it for 10 or so years in my parent's basement until dad got tired of seeing it and hauled it to the trash.