No one's asked this so I will. I'll answer for myself that 3 years ago I moved a 12" Hallicrafters console 65 miles on a 2-wheeled trailer hitched to my bicycle to save it from being dumped. My wife was thrilled as you can
probably imagine!! :nono:
:lmao:

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My first vintage set was when i was about 13. A 66 19" zenith a ittle old lady gave me at a garage sale that i pulled home in a radio flyer wagon wrapped in blankets. It was about 6 blocks away from my house. Mother was thrilled.......

Last year I took a 270+ mile round trip to visit adam. traded a nice porta color and some tubes for the neat 68 panasonic I now have.

Drove 500 miles one-way to San Francisco to pick up my Predicta.
Got in a little sight seeing while there so it made a little more sense.

I've made several 60-70 mile trips to the L.A. area to pick up sets.

Last year I departed the Early Television convention in Ohio for Minnesota solely to pick up the Motorola VK-106 I'd won the previous week on eBay before heading home to Michigan. This past November I traveled to New Jersey for a Chinese Classic (the one with a busted tube...doesn't have one now! :) ) but on that trip I was also on an errand to pick up some stuff from Moyer.

Last year I took a 270+ mile round trip to visit adam. traded a nice porta color and some tubes for the neat 68 panasonic I now have.

I made the same trip twice to get 2 TVs from jordan: my 48 7" moto and 68 zenith 21" color.

I did bring all those sets back from Michigan (2000+mi) , but I was going to take a moving van back from MI anyway. I carried a few sets a mile or so back when I lived in Berkeley. I just got this CTC-12 (only 2mi away) but I have yet to figure out how to get back here.

Well, as a kid, I was able to master getting a CTC-16 table model (complete TV) on the handlebars of my Schwinn Cruiser... I did this many times, and never an accident! I also was known to do TV repair housecalls by motorcycle when I was a teenager... I'd pull the chassis and take it home to work on strapped to the back seat. You don't have to believe me, but it's true!

The longest distance was when I made a trade for a CT-100 with a fellow collector in Portland, OR. I went up & back from Los Angeles; 1,800 miles round trip. I left at 4:00 AM, got there for dinner, stayed at a motel, left at 9:00 AM for home and arrived home at 2 or 3 AM the next morning!

The greatest length that I have gone to lately to get a neat TV was actually harder than the above... I went 20 miles to Hollywood at rush hour to get my Zenith roundie. Now THAT WAS A TOUGH TRIP!

Charles

Well, as a kid, I was able to master getting a CTC-16 table model (complete TV) on the handlebars of my Schwinn Cruiser... I did this many times, and never an accident! I also was known to do TV repair housecalls by motorcycle when I was a teenager... I'd pull the chassis and take it home to work on strapped to the back seat. You don't have to believe me, but it's true!

The longest distance was when I made a trade for a CT-100 with a fellow collector in Portland, OR. I went up & back from Los Angeles; 1,800 miles round trip. I left at 4:00 AM, got there for dinner, stayed at a motel, left at 9:00 AM for home and arrived home at 2 or 3 AM the next morning!

The greatest length that I have gone to lately to get a neat TV was actually harder than the above... I went 20 miles to Hollywood at rush hour to get my Zenith roundie. Now THAT WAS A TOUGH TRIP!

Charles

once dragged home a ctc5 in a radio flyer hitched to a moped as a teen.
once carried a 21fj on my lap....on a kz1000 drag bike! talk about getting odd looks from cops!
me and a friend did many service calls on a motorcycle.
brought home several old sets on trash day with a wagon and a rupp.

As a kid, I always went to estate sales and garage sales with my bike. Mom and Dad never cared as long as I stayed relativley close to home, about a 10 mile radius. When you are a kid, 10 miles on a bike took some time! I found old TV's like crazy back in the early-mid 90's. the most common sets I found were zenith 4 tuber hybrids and the 16" tube type plastic case zenith sets from the early 70's.
One of my most memorable finds was back in 1994 when I was riding my bike home from school (7th grade) with my friend. There was a home getting a new roof put on and had a full dumpster of the old shingles, sitting on top of all the shingles was a zenith 16" plastic case tube set. I was a good 2 miles away from home at this point. My friend and I pulled the set and set it on the ground behind a bush so it would be "safe" untill we could get back. I got home and rigged up the radioflyer to my old schwinn and towed it home. I never forgot all the looks I would get whenever I was pulling a TV home on the bike.
I tried not to ask mom or dad about picking up a TV for me as it was always NO, but when I brought one home on the wagon, they had no choice. Id get yelled at but it never stopped me. They soon realized TV collecting was a hobby and they became open to it once I started to drive.
Seems like all of us have had the bike rigged up to a wagon before. Looking back, that was a lot of work to go through! You had to ride around to find the TV, then ride all the way home to get the wagon, ride back to the house you found it, pad it up, and safely balance the TV on the wagon so it would flip over on the ride home, not to mention ride home very slowly. Going up a hill was fun wasnt it? You had to put the bike into the lowest gear so you could pull that 70lb TV up the slope! Ive only got one "bike" find left in my collection (a ctc-22). Most of those sets I found got taken apart with my friends and we would keep the parts, as having the tubes and chassis to look at was more fun than the complete TV.

As far as my longest TV road trip, it was in 2003, I drove 900 miles round trip to trade a zenith chromacolor to jstout66 for a '68 rca table color set. Ive made several 600 mile round trips to captainmoody to trade sets, probably will be going back up there to trade off some other sets this spring.

I drove from Virginia to Michigan to Pick up a projection TV from Bryan Durbal and when I got there it was too large so I bought a 7 inch Philco and a 7 inch motorola instead. I drove to West Virginia to get a Temple. I drove to Plymouth Mass to get a Raytheon Console. I drove to ohio to get a 7 inch Majestic console. I drove to Long Island twice, Dumount Doghouse and some 10 inch Philcos. I drove to New Jersey twice, once for 7 inch Automatic console, once for a Chinese 10 inch console. I drove to Pennsyvania many times for TVs, Philco 1000, English Ecko set and others. I drove to Eastern Shore Maryland for an RCA 630, Hagerstown Maryland for a Sparton Mirror in lid and Aberdeen Maryland for a 7 inch Firestone. I live 35 miles from Craig Roberts but bought a projection tv from him in Ohio at ETF meeting. I saw a 10 inch Hoffman in long Beach Ca and some in Arizona but passed on them since I was flying on an airplane. The weirdest place was an antique store in Illinois that was selling antique coffins, graveyard fixtures, wire recorders and TVs. I bought a 10 inch Crosley and passed on a blonde Predicta Tandem.

When I was in high school we went on a walking field trip to the park to study the physics of merry-go-rounds, well I saw a late 1970's XL-100 19" color set in the trash along the way. I picked it up and carried it about a mile to the park and put it in the park outhouse for storage while we did the centrifugal force demonstration on the merry go round. Then I carried the set back to the school and put it in the boiler room till Mom picked me up one time with the car. That set got pretty heavy carrying it 1 mile uphill.

While I often thought of dragging one home with a bicycle, I never did it. I was in the same boat where my parents probably wouldn't have let me have half the stuff I brought home if I had asked. I can think of a couple 21" bw consoles that I was able to get delivered by the seller. I know I brought home a little Sony bw on the bike from over 5 miles away & I may have even brought home a portacolor but can't recall.

At the other edge of the woods we lived in front of there were a couple tv sets, one being a 21" bw Firestone. Pure junk, of course, as they had been back there since the sixties, but I did do a lot of head scratching trying to find some way to get that thing home. Its still sitting there, I'm sure.

I once had a CTC-15 combo which was a curb find & very rough. Had I found it nowadays I would fix it up but it had the worst cataracts I'd ever seen & had no idea they could be repaired. I pulled the chassis then used a lawn mower to drag it across the soybean field and then rolled it into the woods. Not long ago I went back, hopeful I might be able to rescue the crt, but it was nowhere to be found.

As far as distance, I've brought back a number from KY/WV/OH but I was out there already so no big deal. So really the only time I went out of my way was the trip a couple years ago to get a portacolor from Colortrakker & an ebay CTC-12 in Philly. Some of you guys really make me look lazy!

Well, I'm never going to win this p***ing contest with any of my stories, but here they are anyway:

I drove from NJ halfway out Long Island about fifteen years ago to pick up a Dumont RA-103 someone was giving away. My daughter was only about three or four, so it was more of a grand adventure than an annoying commute. I've wondered many times if it was worth all the trouble, but I still have the set.

As a grade-school kid, while into fixing radios but well before the TV-collecting pathology kicked in, my best friend and I were walking home from school one day and saw an old console TV on the curb outside someone's house. It was Halloween day. We decided that it would be a good idea to carry it home to strip it for parts. So we did. And I mean we carried it home. I guess I was in a lot better shape back then, because we didn't have no stinkin' wagon, we carried it by hand for over half a mile to my back yard.

Anyway, we stripped the set for parts and left the carcass behind my dad's tool shed. Exactly a year later, on Halloween, (it's possible that we may have been drinking) we decided it would be a great idea if this set showed up back on the curb at the house we took it from. So we carried it back, and with an emerging sense of geek-humor, just about wet ourselves laughing about it for days! (Gee, we were such hoodlums!)

Much later (actually last year, well after post-adolescence common sense should have kicked in at least a bit) I dragged home an rotting Electrola. I know, it's not a TV, but it was actually bigger and heavier than most TVs! (The beast didn't actually fit into my van, but that's part of the charm of the story.) The whole episode doesn't reflect well on my propriety, but a number of Electrola collectors were happy about getting the parts from it. Here's a link to the story: What Do You Do With The Leftover Parts? (http://www.njarc.org/member2member.htm#005)

--Dave

I don't have any long distance stories, but back when I was a kid I carried many a TV home on foot. Almost all were B&W sets, color sets were still worth too much to dump.

If it was the weekend that people put junk out on the street I'd go out looking with an old pram to wheel stuff home with. Sometimes I'd just strip stuff on the street rather than take the whole thing home. I brought a lot of stuff home that way. My parents were less than thrilled, but they eventually relented when they realised I got in less trouble when I was allowed to play with my junk at home.

Sometimes I'd find sets when I wasn't actually out looking. Usually I'd lug them home somehow rather than go back later with the pram. Every so often I'd find a set on the way to school. If I was closer to school than home I'd drag it into class with me and put it under my desk. They teachers didn't like it, but they allowed it because if they told me to leave it outside I'd take it all the way home.

Then there was the day I found a 25" Rank Arena color console on the way to school. There was no way I could move this thing on my own. Back then any color set was a big deal, so there was no way I wasn't taking it. It was still there after school, so I managed to convince a girl who had a thing for me to help me carry it all the way home. I should have known then that any girl who'd help me drag a TV home then spend rest of the afternoon playing Atari 2600 on one of my working B&W sets was a keeper. I never did get that Rank Arena working.

Old habbits die hard. Even now there are times that I find something when I am out walking and carry it home rather than go back for the car. Not that long ago I had walked down to the shops to get some food and found a complete Hitachi Peach computer system (an unusual 6809 based system from the early 80s, I also collect old computers). It was only the second one that I had ever seen in the flesh. I packed it all into a couple of suitcases that had also been dumped and carried it home.