Quote:
Originally Posted by dieseljeep
The early Panasonic built small screen sets, Penncrest, Bradford and Singer didn't age too gracefully.
Brittle PC boards and tube sockets, convergence cloverleafs and waxpaper capacitors. They really had the strange tube types, 9AQ8, 15CW5, 9A8 etc.
You always had to chase for them, as you didn't repair that many of them.
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I recall Channel Master labeling Japanese sets also. Of course, Sears and Roebuck's wicked price-point placed many of these smaller color sets in circulation in our area.
Like Tom said, loaded with cardboard fishpaper. It shielded the lousy ABS plastic case from the tube heat and kept the coins and other crap kids would push into the long vent slots from landing on something energized. After reluctantly working on one, I NEVER thought I was finished
, like there was something else wrong preventing it from looking good.
And those wacky-ass tubes sure kept us from subbing them to make SURE we were done. Id call out a number and the boss would say: "sounds like a bastard" A lot of those frame-grid euro-types from Amperex and Mullard were actually improvements as described in old issues of the PF reporter.
With small cars, the USA's big 4 took a ham-fisted approach, producing legendary lemons because they could not make money on them. American TV makers did not make too many survivors in small-screen color sets for the same reason. With apologies to Zenith and GE's budget-priced porta-color, Sony kicked their collective bums on that alone!