Motorola "works in a drawer" color set wanted

[julianburke]

I worked for Modan Service here in Knoxville in the late '60's and we serviced only Motorola's and Zeniths. Charlie Duncan, a former Motorola field service rep and Dan Geddings, a Zenith only service guy merged/partnered with Charles Moore who was retired from Graybar (distributor of Zenith products) and it was a rather large operation servicing about a 100 mile radius. I did field work on both models and funny, I never saw any evidence of a Quasar being "junk". I worked on hundreds of them that came in from all over east Tennessee and even taught a regular class on servicing them. I still have my module caddy and the most trouble I had out of most Quasars was the IF/SOUND module with the VERTICAL module to follow. Quasar was a very expensive set of the day to the tune of $800-1000 when a high priced Zenith was about $700.

Like any other brand and the "servicemen" who have not been to any school of like model and get lost in it through not knowing how it works or to properly troubleshoot it, I suppose they would consider it "junk". It was a very revolutionary and timely set that unquestionably set the standard for modular TV's PERIOD. At that time the market was very ready for more reliability and that the set could be fixed quickly and properly in the customers' home. Tubes and soldered in parts were quickly becoming unpopular not to mention obsolete and the handwriting was on the wall for the old tube guys who could not service or adapt to solid state. Also heavy tube sets that could not be fixed in the home had to leave the home and owners often would have heartburn over this fact as sets would commonly come back with scars, scratches & scrapes from clumsy, careless or poor and cramped work spaces. I personally have seen sets with cigarette burns all over the inside of the cabinet from smoker servicemen. Yep, the Quasar was a welcome and timely instrument for the day!

BTW, I found far more intermittents in Zenith module stake connectors than Motorola. The only Motorola set I would ever consider "junk" was their first rectangular set with a 23EGP22 but that model led the way for newer design of delta picture tubes, AND it was a very short lived set and is an extremely hard TV to find nowadays. I have one of those in my collection.

Also, does anyone know why Zenith had handwired sets for so long?? That manufacturing process was a cumbersome and expensive way to manufacture a TV for the day and was obsolete. Zenith touted it as quality, quality, quality in all of their advertising! Quality had virtually nothing to do with it as Zenith did NOT want to spend the money to update their manufacturing process. This is fact and was a very bad idea at the roundtable as it started the beginning of the end for Zenith. Most of their products were always 40-50% higher than comparable products of different manufacture. Too little too late cost Zenith market share and as always in manufacturing there are three little words in the 'biz--BETTER, FASTER, CHEAPER and not necessarily in that order. Magnavox was made right here in Knoxville to their end of manufacturing and every year the engineers HAD to come up with designs & ideas that would lower the cost of a set by at least 7% annually. Not really hard to do as new IC's and other components would always come on the market yearly.