Today, I decided to take a shot at repairing/restoring a couple of suitcase style electrostatic sets that have sat in a dark corner of my display room for at least 20 years. They seem to be virtually identical, but likely will offer up a few surprises.
The first is a Sentinal 400-TV, which I slowly powered up on a variac... all tubes including the CRT seem to have heater glow... no smoke, slight hum and volume control scratch, but no HV or sound. It is only drawing about 95 watts, so perhaps one supply is down. The base cap is stuck on the CRT, so I am proceeding slowly and carefully and have not removed either chassis.
The second is an Airline, which is in somewhat better condition (no chassis rust) but has an unfortunate hole drilled above the tuner knob, (perhaps for fine tuning) and no light from the tuner tubes, but otherwise behaves the same as the Sentinal (no HV, no sound, no smoke, about 95 watts draw).
Looking forward to some good fun in the days (weeks, months?) ahead.
jr