View Full Version : Another Truckload of TV's


bgadow
08-10-2005, 10:26 PM
Am I nuts? I'm sure my wife thinks so. I warned her...

A few months back I posted on Freecycle that I was interested in older model tv sets but nobody responded. I tried again last week. The first response was from a woman wondering why I had not responded to her posting for a 15 year old console tv. I explained I was no good with newer sets but would keep it in mind should I find a home for it. The other response was from a woman who suggested I call a TV repairman in another town "way over yonder". I did not have much hope for this leading to anything but called & learned that, yes, he DID have some sets that were just taking up space & I was welcome to them. I asked if he was interested in the aforementioned console & he said yes so I went & picked it up for him.

First, about that console. Turns out it was a '91 RCA 35", the cream of the crop. Surround sound, all kinds of bells & whistles-I kinda hated to give it away! The owner said the picture had been cutting in & out. Of course, when I got home with it I had to open it up for curiousity. Something very familiar with the set-full "fiber" back with those same old twisty things holding it on, still had the Victor & Victrola trademarks, a fairly big chassis for a newer model. My eyes then fell on something that broke my heart. Somebody-not me!-had broken the exhaust tip on the crt! I later found the plastic piece that the pins go through, with the glass still stuck to it, floating around in the bottom of the cabinet. The crt socket assy. was dangling. I guess somebody, thinking the connection there was bad?,pulled it but for some reason yanked that plastic piece which appeared to be bonded to the glass. Somebody made an expensive mistake. They instantly turned what had been a very nice set into scrap. So, I gave the tv repairman the chassis & tommorow I'm going to trash the rest.

On to the good stuff. The gentleman who gave me these (and anyone who GIVES me a tv set is a gentleman, unless they are a lady!) fixes up curb-find sets on the side. He realizes these would never sell & aren't worth his time, but are too good to toss. These are all tube or hybrid, most are color. He had no consoles, which is a good thing.

Photo 1-Left pile from the top, a very cheap Portacolor, even by Portacolor standards. Plain beige case, no built in antenna, no handle. Dot matrix crt. Next down is an RCA, old emblem. Then a Zenith. The bottom one is a Sylvania. The right pile starts with an RCA, this one proudly advertising "XL Color", then a Zenith with an unusual green crt bezel, and then another oddball, a Motorola Quasar.

Photo 2-Zenith & GE 12" bw sets, then an old emblem RCA bw.

Photo 3-At the top is an Airline. Not sure yet who made it, its from Taiwan. The middle one is a GE. At the bottom is a Motorola-the heaviest of the bunch.

Photo 4-2 RCA's & a 4-tube Zenith.

Photo 5-a 12" bw RCA & another little Zenith.

I really wanted one of the smaller Zeniths as well as some more "oddballs" (meaning something other than RCA/Zenith) and now I've got them.

There are 18 sets in this stack, and he has some more-a gaggle of small bw sets plus 1 or 2 more RCAs similiar to the others-one is a Mural-plus a later model tube GE & maybe another Zenith. He also has some tubes & schematics, so I'll be calling him again soon.

What will I do with them all? I can't keep them. I want to try & save the oddballs but the RCAs especially will need to go. So if anybody is interested they are yours. The bad news to all of this-they have been stored in a shed for some time & it was not real weatherproof. Lots of rust on some of these sets. The old Motorola, in particular, has not had an easy life but I really want to save it. We'll see.

andy
08-11-2005, 12:55 AM
I might be interested in the RCA under the portacolor. Is it a CTC-22? I've been looking for one of those for a while. Unfortunately, I don't have time to pick it up. Is there any chace you could to ship it to PA?

Chad Hauris
08-11-2005, 06:56 AM
Great find there Bryan! looks like a ctc-22 in there, also several CTC-53's and a CTC-36...those 18" RCA color sets usually have good CRT's and flybacks. The weird thing I have seen on some of those RCA color portables is some bad yokes due to arcing.
There was a Mural TV version made of the CTC-53, this is a deluxe version with lighted channel numbers and a 75 ohm cable input. If you keep one, the Mural TV would be the one to as they always seem to have the most special features such as A/V inputs, grounded power cords, 75 ohm cable input, etc.

jroberts500
08-11-2005, 10:51 AM
I find it very interesting that once again an apparently unlikely source of information turns out to be very valuable. It inspires me to try harder to find sets that will otherwise become garbage
I would like to have the Motorola and that Quasar but I would understand if those are the ones you will keep.
When I was a kid I would help Ed Callahan of Ed's TV in St. Pete. He was a Quasar dealer and so I came to like those as well as many others. I still remember that commercial with the woman singing very pretty and high; "...Quasar... (big heavy drum sound of Bum Bum Bum)...(then the professional sounding man says)...by Motorola.
I will be needing an RCA ctc36 for parts at some time but I'm trying to find a specific cabinet with that chassis which would be a '69 model with the brown fabric over the speaker.
Thanks for helping preserve stuff from the past! I genuinely appreciate the efforts of all of the very cool people here!
SIncerely, John

bgadow
08-11-2005, 11:51 AM
Andy, I'll keep you in mind on that RCA. I'm kinda partial to it, especially since its small & space is getting tight. (this shed where I have them stacked was supposed to be empty & gone months ago!) It will be a short while before I've really gone through these.

I've liked those 18" RCAs for along time but I already have a clean, working example. Now I've cornered the market!

bgadow
08-16-2005, 09:06 AM
I've started testing these sets. The Zenith in the last pic works but with a washed out picture & vertical problems. Lots of promise. The green bezeled Zenith has no B+. The Airline needs a can cap & likely some other work.

I didn't hold out much hope for the Portacolor. Beat up, with some chassis mounting tabs busted, very rusty, and full of dirt. I cleaned it out the best I could & checked everything over. I gave it a whirl. Its official, I can never again say anything bad about the General Electric Company. The only thing I touched up was the color & tint. There is an intermittent which I think is a flaky contrast control, but it goes away once warmed up. I really like this dot matrix tube better than the later stripe crt.

OvenMaster
08-16-2005, 09:35 AM
I had one of those 12" Zeniths as shown in photo 2. It got some vertical black lines in the pic that actually went away when the set was slapped repeatedly! Lasted for like 20 years, too.
Tom

andy
08-16-2005, 02:22 PM
Those portacolors never work very well, but they never seem to stop working.

Celt
08-16-2005, 02:46 PM
Those portacolors never work very well, but they never seem to stop working.
The same can be said of alot of things GE makes. ;)

bgadow
08-23-2005, 09:25 PM
Continuing through the pile...I thought about saving this one for the last. Its probably my favorite out of this group but also the one in roughest shape. I wasn't sure if it was really worth my time. Its a Motorola 21" from early '69. I would say this was late in production as the publish date on the Sams is early '68 & I know there were similiar models built through 67. (I had a couple, 25" table models) First, this thing is HEAVY. Uses the full Zenith style point-to-point chassis. Doesn't seem nearly as easy to work on, though. Everything seems to be buried under a loom of wires. As I have seen with other Motorola's of various vintages, there is a real eye toward the serviceman but still there are dim-bulb ideas. The tuner/control assy. has to be pulled with the chassis & it isn't that easy. Its great that they put the convergence controls on the front (behind the speaker grille) but there is no service switch. There is some small gizmo on the control panel that is red & hooks to a terminal on the tuner. I really don't know what it is! An early red LED to indicate tuning? Or just an encapsulated red miniature bulb? I thought maybe a brightness sensor but it light shined there has no effect. The Sams offered no help there; lots of production changes, I found.

Anyway, the set has problems. One, the cabinet (all steel except the plastic back) is all bent out of shape from being on the bottom of a big pile of sets. It took a lot of weight to do some of the deforming. I straightened it out the best I could without pulling the crt. The bigger problem is chassis rust. This set saw plenty of moisture, sitting on the ground in an open shed for who knows how long. This chassis would have been that pretty copper color when new but you can hardly find a bit of that now. Just heavy rust. Plus, when I turned it upside down, there were about a dozen wires with old splices, covered up in masking tape. Old, dried up masking tape. I peeled some back enough to satisfy me that the splices underneath are good. Then I found the 2 loose wires on the width coil. Looks like they gave up on the replacement job halfway through. Took some detective work to make sure the wires got connected right. Remember what I said about all those thick wire looms running everywhere? Then there was the peaking coil that was falling apart, though I was able to save it. After finally satisfying myself that everything was more or less intact & not shorted out with iron oxide, I said what the heck. I yanked the horiz. output & powered it up. I'll be darned, I had sound! But then the filament string went dark (but not the crt filament). I found that the fuse for the filament had blown. It used a 1" lenght of #18 fuse wire. Where do I find THAT? Or, what would be a good substitute?

I finally determined that the overload was caused by either a)a short somewhere at the tuner or b)the degaussing coil, somehow. Either way, with the coil unhooked it once again worked. I need to fuse it once I figure it out.

I was able to tune in a station so after a trial run I powered down, popped the horiz.out back in-and it worked! Once I ran it through setup it worked fairly well, considering. I had read about Motorola's color reproduction & this one seems to live up to that. Nothing to write home about. The tint control doesn't seem to do anything but the hue control offers plenty of choices, though none seems quite right. For now I am very happy. The crt (with a Motorola EIA number) has green cataracts which can distract from some pics but I'll live with that a long time before I have to give it the "hot wire" treatment!

One last thing, all but 3 tubes were missing when I got it. Never wanting to do things the easy way, I quickly determined that I could replace them all with NOS tubes from my shelves but instead replaced most of them with USED tubes. And thats whats in it now. It was potluck but they worked, I didn't go back & replace any of them. The set uses one 6GH8 but lots of odd stuff, several 6BL8's for one thing. I noticed that a good number of the used tubes I put in were Motorola brand so maybe they were the main users of such weirdos. Think, at the same time they were making this old thing they were also cranking out state of the art all solid state Quasars. Talk about night & day.

bgadow
08-23-2005, 09:44 PM
After the Motorola I brought in the RCA CTC-22. That one works okay but has no color. After swapping some 5GH8s I could get some color stripes in the background but not much else. For now it goes back in storage.

I followed that with this Zenith, 14CC14 chassis, built in 71. This one worked great right away. I just touched up the vertical controls. I do need to pull the vol.control/power switch as its flaky. Interesting to compare this set to the RCA-2 companies both faced with building a 14" color tv but going about it from their own perspective. This set is newer by 2 or 3 years but is bigger, a lot heavier, and works better. Soon I will tackle a 14" Sylvania which should be another ball of wax.

Note that like most of this pile the Zenith has a pretty good coating of rust on the chassis. Doesn't seem to hurt anything.

holmesuser01
08-23-2005, 10:29 PM
That red LED on your Motorola is actually a neon indicator that tells you that you are watching a COLOR show. Be good to that door that is over the secondary controls on the front of that set. They are RARE, according to the guy that broke the door off of the set we had from 1968-1973.

veg-o-matic
08-24-2005, 08:22 AM
The tint control doesn't seem to do anything but the hue control offers plenty of choices, though none seems quite right.

Hey, Bryan:

Just a thought. Was Motorola one of the companies that had the "extra" tint control that added blue or sepia to a BW picture? I keep coming across that feature in old Consumer Reports, but I can never remember who had it.

veg

Chad Hauris
08-24-2005, 09:10 AM
On Motorola or quasar sets the control for the chroma phase that adjusts the tint of the picture is called "hue"
The color level control usually called "color" is called "intensity"
and the "tint" control is for color temperature toward blue or sepia, called "chromix" on Sears Silvertone, "chromatone" on Magnavox or "color fidelity" on Admiral. RCA never had such a control and neither did Zenith as far as I can tell.

The terms "hue" and "intensity" were still used on Quasar sets through the 80's, probably as long as Quasars were still made, even though they were then made by Matsushita and not Motorola.

old_tv_nut
08-24-2005, 04:22 PM
Actually, it was on all the other sets besides Motorola/Quasar that the control that adjusts hue was called "tint" :)

colortrakker
08-24-2005, 05:00 PM
Zenith called their tint knob Hue for the longest time - into the mid '70s, at least.

And somewhere I have ads for Magnavox sets with Chromatone, indeed a more versatile version of the 3-stage color temperature settings on new sets.

bgadow
08-25-2005, 10:32 AM
TV Nut, what chassis' did you work on at Motorola? Anything we can blame on you? :)

old_tv_nut
08-25-2005, 01:29 PM
I started out working on transistor black and white chassis, never worked on color chassis. (Whew, escaped that spear!) :D