Collector friend sent me a message that he was moving and had some stuff to give me if I wanted it, free is always good so of course I said yes.

Here's the haul.

630TS chassis, full of tubes and in reasonably good condition.

Blond 49 Hoffman 10" rough, missing the knobs and back and the CRT is weak but would work well with a brightener.

1956 RCA 21" metal tabletop set, paint is rough but the set is complete and the chassis is very clean.
CRT is very tired, got decent emissions out of it after cooking but cutoff was lousy. I like it though so if I can find a good CRT I'd like to restore it someday.

1953 Zenith metal table set (not shown), complete rusted wreck but it had a decent 21YP4 CRT that I saved, along with the tubes and knobs, the cabinet hit the dumpster, the chassis will go to e-cycle.

And the creme de la creme of the bunch, a Philco 48-2500, complete except for the back and the keystoned shape piece of glass under the screen (which I have a spare of) , it's incredibly dirty from being in (literally) a barn for who knows how long but on closer inspection looks to be in pretty decent condition, maybe even better than the Blond version I've been doodling with for the last three years. much of what looks like scratches in the picture is actually spider webs and trash stuck to it.

When you get around to it, I'd love to see more pics of the Hoffman with the doors open. I'm curious what it looks like inside :)

When you get around to it, I'd love to see more pics of the Hoffman with the doors open. I'm curious what it looks like inside :)

That's easy, just look at this one. :yes:
It's the same except the Blonde would have a light Grille Cloth and Ivory (or off white) colored knobs.

http://www.vintagetvsets.com/hoffman10.htm

I have a 12" Hoffman in blonde also, exactly the same but a little bigger all around.

I really like that!!! :yes:

Interesting. Did any other tabletop TVs have doors?

Phil Nelson

Put the Beltron on the CRT's in the RCA and the Hoffman, both restored veryquickly and check like new now! I'll give it some time and recheck them in the future and see if they hold up, if they do then they will probably be good enough to make restoring the sets worthwhile, at least the RCA, the Hoffman needs quite a bit of work so the tube might be best used somewhere else.

@ Phil

That`s a really good question!:tresbon:

I don`t wanna say that there is no Santa Clause, only because I never saw
one :D , but with my experience with TVs from around the world and all the
pictures I know from mags, sales literature, ebay-like sites, I should say "no"!

There are a few 60s Tvs, let us call them "low boys", the australian name
for table sets with long legs, having doors, mostly sliding doors to use them
too in furniture walls and to hide the face of the set.

I will keep this in mind, but I think this is unique in TV history!

Example of a "furniture wall" (I translated directly:scratch2:)
See picture "1960" of this link:

http://www.urbanara.de/blog/allgemein/60-jahre-wohnen-2/

TV-Collector :stupid:

The Bendix 235 tabletop also had doors.
http://www.earlytelevision.org/bendix_235-miu.html

RCA also had a tabletop model with doors that opened out and then slid into the sides 8-T-244. There was a Stromberg Carlson recently offered on ebay with doors.

Well this is a surprise.
Took the Variac out to the garage tonight to see what the 56 RCA would do, I had to replace the 6DQ6 output tube because it had gone to air but otherwise everything looked intact, though very dirty.

Spent about five minutes slowly bringing it up to full voltage, checking as I went along to see if anything was getting hot. Everything seemed okay, filters were staying cool, 5U4 wasn't glowing red so I took it up to 110 volts (drawing about 1 amp) and was greeted with a nice full raster! Not bad for a set that's been stored under less than ideal conditions, probably since Nixon was in office.

Couldn't tune in any signal and there was no sound at all, maybe it's missing the speaker or something, didn't check that but there wasn't a peep out of it but that's probably a minor issue, at least all the major parts are working.

Cool, all the major components are good :)

Pacafic Mercury made a set in a abletop cabinet with doors and a 10" CRT (round), as did Stewart Warner.

I used to have a 21" RCA set just like that one. Mine worked well after replacing the 5U4 which was cracked from being bumped somehow by the previous owner. I didn't have sound on mine either when I first powered it up. It turned out that the speaker cone had almost completely rotted away. Yours probably needs the speaker replaced like mine did.

The Bendix 235 tabletop also had doors.
http://www.earlytelevision.org/bendix_235-miu.html

There was a Tele-tone badged version of that set too.