My first Roundie: a CTC-16 in a chineese cabinet

[jpdylon]

A followup to this thread.

A 1962(?) CTC-16 in a chineese cabinet. I bought it from the original owner, an 85 year old lady who was quite nice. Her son, who posted the craigslist ad was wanting to gut it and put something else in the cabinet, but she was glad to see it go to someone who would fix it up.

Upon unloading it into the shop I pulled the back off to find 30+ years of thick dust. It had been serviced at some point in its life, judging by the sticker from a local shop on the back. The CRT is an RCA hi-lite, a brand new Grade AA tube. I'm not sure when it was installed, but there is just a slight cataract barely noticable from a distance -- I'll probably leave it alone for awhile. All tubes but the HO, h-oscillator, and voltage regulator appear to be original.

I haven't powered it up yet. Should I just pull all the tubes and bring it up little by little? Or just re-cap everything and power it up? THe flyback looks ok, and doesn't appear to have any noticable heavy flaw. There is a small black mark near the core, but I won't know for sure if its dead until I try to fire it up. From what I can tell the fuses are intact and the breaker has not tripped.

Can't wait to start diggin into this guy. I'm stoked

[bgadow]

I am not usually real gentle starting up sets of this vintage. If the set hasn't been powered up in a long time it wouldn't hurt to start it slow. I wouldn't pull all the tubes, just the horizontal/HV circuits should be disabled, if you decide to do it that way. From my experience it should at least halfway power up. Now, if the set was older, from the Black Beauty era, I would probably just recap the whole thing first.

[jstout66]

COOL set. That's a "black matrix" picture tube in it by the way. Looks like it has a 1976 date code. I usually don't worry about firing up those sets. I think the only fear would be if the flyback, which Moyers should have in stock, so no worries. If you do have a bad flyback, it looks like your chassis is a CTC-16XL. Make sure they know that. I have an early production CTC-16, which is a CTC-16L and they switched flybacks in later runs. I think your set is from 1965. Fire it up ans see what you get! I hada 1960's Sylvania roundie in storage for 10 years and it fired right up.

[jpdylon]

Cool. From what I've head the 'black matrix' tubes have the best pic of the roundies.

The chassis is stanpped CTC-16J The HV cage has the rectifier socket built into the top, and the rectifier top cap is molded into the flyback.

The owner's son said that the set "didn't work." However he didn't specify a completely dead set, raster or sound only, so we'll see.

If it was me I would pull the chassis and clean everything up and replace the supply caps only in the intrest of protecting the power xformer. That is a Hi-Lite tube and the date code as jstout66 pointed out is 1976 so that might be the last time the set was ever serviced.
Give the tubes a bath and clean around the HV socket plastic, I remember as a kid that they were real good at making corona storms.

Go get even more stoked and replace the supply caps, everything else will fall into place.

Now that is a beautiful set! Great find!

109

[kx250rider]

Jordan,

You got it! Happy to see that it went to someone who has been wanting a roundie...

If it were me, I would plug it in with a variac, bring it up to 110 volts over a 10-minute period. Just reach in every minute and feel the three electrolytic cans. If warm, STOP! If cool, keep going, and see what happens. Just keep feeling those cans every minute until the set has been on for a half hour if the set works.

Also watch the H Output to be sure it doesn't start hotplating. You should hear the HV crackle to life at about 90 volts on the variac. Just use common sense, and you will be fine.

I wouldn't recap it, as I have never seen one of those that needed it. Maybe a few hot or leaky electrolytics, but that set uses mylar and other newer caps which don't cause too may problems.

Charles

[Carmine]

Glad to see you got it, and not somebody who'd gut it.

However, doesn't look like that cabinet led an easy life... Was it kept in the garage or something?

[Jeffhs]

Jordan -

Glad you got that CTC16 roundie; as another poster said, it's good to see that someone got this set with the intention of restoring it to its former glory, not just to gut the cabinet and make a bookcase, fishtank, etc. of it. These old TVs are becoming scarce; as I have said many times here, it is up to us AK members to save them from a certain death in a landfill. Most people outside our hobby don't care what happens to their old TV after the flyback, CRT or some other component goes bad and puts the set out of commission; all they want is to get the thing out of their home ASAP--that or else they gut the set, throw the chassis and CRT in the trash, and use the cabinet for something else, or else they put the whole thing on the curb, cabinet and all. The old set is almost certainly replaced with an offshore-manufactured TV (CRT or, more likely today, flat-panel HD) that has next to no value to collectors.

I looked at the pictures you posted and was reminded of the TVs we had in our school when I was in grade school in the '60s; those sets were RCAs with the same front panel layout as your CTC-16, only the sets in our school were b&w table models with rectangular CRTs. In fact, when I got to junior high (middle school) in 1970, I saw the same models of TVs in the classrooms--same control clusters, screen size and all. That must have been a very popular model in the mid-'60s, especially for educational and/or commercial use. It's probably safe to say that the sets used in schools were used mostly or mainly (perhaps even exclusively) on the area's educational TV station. In grade school I remember we had a master-antenna distribution system (years before cable was as popular as it is today) which converted all UHF stations to VHF channels. The educational (PBS, then known as NET) channel in Cleveland is channel 25, which was downconverted to VHF channel 4 in the distribution system. However, my point is that the continuous UHF tuners in our sets probably were not used at all, so when the sets were eventually retired (the grade school I attended was closed and converted to a senior citizens' center in the early 1980s), the UHF tuners may well have been in excellent shape, even if the rest of the sets were on their last legs or outright shot.

BTW, I would date your set a few years post-1962, because it has a UHF tuner. Factory-installed UHF was not mandated by the FCC until April 30, 1964, though earlier sets, RCA and others, often had provisions for UHF, with a small knockout plug on the front panel where the UHF tuner was to be installed. (My aunt and uncle had a Sylvania console TV in the '60s with such an arrangement, but since Cleveland only had VHF channels 3, 5 and 8 at the time [the city didn't get its first UHF station, a PBS affiliate, until 1965], they never had the optional UHF tuner installed or even used a converter ahead of the VHF tuner.) In fact, I would probably guess that your set was made in 1965 or '66.




Kind regards,

[Sandy G]

I said in the other thread about this set that I was VERY glad you got this set, Jordan, I still am, & am looking forward to pictures of Glorious Lollipop Color...<grin>

[blue_lateral]

Gorgeous set, Jordan.

John

[Whirled One]

Nice TV! You don't see these sets in chinese-style cabinets that often..! The top of the cabinet could use a little "TLC", but then it should look pretty sharp!

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

Jordan -
BTW, I would date your set a few years post-1962, because it has a UHF tuner. Factory-installed UHF was not mandated by the FCC until April 30, 1964, though earlier sets, RCA and others, often had provisions for UHF, with a small knockout plug on the front panel where the UHF tuner was to be installed.

That's true, and you're right about the "mandatory-UHF" date, but nearly every TV made since the UHF TV band was allocated (1952) was available with a factory-installed UHF tuner. UHF-equipped ("all-channel" as they were sometimes called) models typically ran about $20 list over their equivalent VHF-only models. A few years ago I ran across an article in an old TV-service trade magazine that had a chart showing the number of UHF-tuner-equipped sets produced per year as a percentage of total TV sets produced that year. I don't remember exact figures, but seem to recall that the percentage got to something around 30% in the mid-1950's, but fell to about 10% at its lowest point around 1958 before starting to climb back up. (Of course, after 1964, that number would have been 100%).

In any case, the presense of a factory UHF tuner (or telltale signs that one was available) only tells you that the TV was made no earlier than 1952, and the *lack* of a factory UHF tuner only tells you that the TV was made no later than 1964 (well, it could also mean that you just stumbled on a Canadian model TV, since Canada didn't mandate UHF tuners until a few years later (1970 or so?)).

More UHF TV-dating fun (but not that kind of dating):

If the TV has separate VHF/UHF tuners and *both* tuners have click stops for each channel (or some equivalent method of "presetting" channels so that VHF and UHF tuning is reasonably similar to each other), then that's generally a clue that the set is probably 1975 or newer, but sometimes you'll encounter sets somewhat older that have click-stop UHF tuners. If the set has a regular click-stop VHF tuner but the UHF dial is a single continuous dial, then the TV should be older than 1975. (However, unlike the "mandatory-UHF" rule, the "equal-access UHF tuning" rule apparently didn't have a strict deadline; I think the FCC allowed a phase-in process of a year or two on that one) As an aside, I wonder if the FCC just kinda gave up bothering to enforce this one after a while-- in the early 1990's, I remember seeing some cheap 12" B&W TV's at Monkey Wards that had the traditional dual tuning knobs, with a regular switch-type tuner for VHF, but with a continuous UHF tuner (which covered only up to channel 69, so it wasn't like some weird old "leftover" tuner or something). [Note that those little portable TV's with continuous tuning for both VHF and UHF are perfectly OK according to the rules, since they still provide "equivalent" tuning for UHF and VHF.]

Which brings up another thing. At some point, the RF spectrum used by UHF TV channels 70 through 83 got reallocated for various other purposes, one of which being the (now nearly obsolete) analog celluar telephone system. As such, TV manufacturers started changing the coverage of their UHF tuners to cover only channels 14-69. In sort of an interesting twist, about this time the FCC banned the sale of *radio* receivers that could receive the cellular telephone band, despite the fact that practically every American household already had a device that could receive the FM audio information in that spectrum-- namely a television set with a UHF tuner covering up to channel 83.

Whew! I didn't mean to write that much about UHF TV tuners! Apologies for the topic drift. Anyway, I'm not trying to be a pendant; just trying to clear up a little misconception that I've seen here every once in a while.

BTW, AFAIK, the CTC-16 wasn't even introduced until 1964 or '65, so in that case I would imagine that all CTC-16's are "all-channel."

[jpdylon]

Carmine: The set was in a house with 3 kids, and regularly used to set things on top of. THe Lady who owned it was also moving out into a nursing home, and it had been bumped around during the move.


Thanks for the useful information guys. I'll bring it up and check the filter cans to make sure they don't get warm. I noticed alot of mylar caps, so I figured my work on the chassis would be light. i have plenty of sams "fast video servicing" bulletins for the CTC-16 chassis so I should be good if I need service data.

Glad to know what year I'm looking at. i was kinda confused, but now that it was mentioned I do remember the UHF mandate in 64.

Little by little I'm gonna make this look beautiful both cosmetically and picture wise. When I have the time and $$$ I would like to have the cabinet re-laquered. While the set and CRT is out of the cabinet, I'll probably fix the slight catarac.

[jpdylon]

After changing out the HV regulator, and cleaning the pots, and clearing out the rest of the crud on the chassis, I brought it up slow from 40-90 for about 40 mins. The filters stayed nice and cool, so I popped in the damper and HO and gave it a go. It appears that 2 of the large filter cans were replaced at some time.

I was greeted with a bight, sharp raster that obviously needed some convergence and height adjustments. Right now there is no color, but the 1st color amp and detector tubes are dead, as is the AGC/sync seperator. It was really hard to lock in a picture at first. You can see the temperature probe in the picture is a little wavy. The lack of height I think is due to the fat lytic cap near the vert out tube. The height twitches from big to small alot when cold. The vert out tube tests fine.

Now if i could just find my tripod so the pic won't be so jittery...

[kx250rider]

Looks like you're on the right track! The vertical issues could definitely be a filter cap, and you should really check all of them again including the 3 big cans. I also see a bad video smear, which could be a cap or other problems (nothing serious, though).

Do you have extend-O-cables so that you can stand the chassis upright on a chair behind the set and run it for testing? If so, you can power the chassis, and do a quick test on all the cans: Use a VTVM (NOT a regular volt/ohmmeter; those won't work for this trick) on the AC scale, set the range for something in the 200 volt area, and with the (-) connected to the chassis, probe each electrolytic section to see that the AC swings up and then down near zero right away. If you see AC voltage more than a few volts staying on any of those sections, that's a leak. Watch for any cans that are NOT chassis grounded, particularly I think theres one with a black paper cover. You have to move your (-) probe to the (-) side of those cans, or you will read funny and could reverse-connect and blow the meter. The above test can be done with a scope if you don't have a VTVM handy, but that's more hassle.

I bet you will find 2 or 3 of the 80 @ 450 caps leaky! I like those chasses, and if you want to haul the chassis up to LA, I will help you on it if I get a free evening. I have a jig with all the adaptors for that set.

BY THE WAY: That's an EARLY model 16. You can't tell it from a CTC-15 from the front. The CTC-12, 15, and 16 are interchangable as long as the control panels match, as I used to swap CTC-16XLs into earlier cabinets when the 12s and 15s would give me problems.

Charles

[jpdylon]

Thanks for the offer and help Charles. With my new job I won't be seeing much time of my own to work on this set. I don't have any extensions or a test jig, so no fun there.

I will pull the chassis and replace the Filter lytics, as well as any others I find as a precaution. THe CRT still tests really strong, so I may consider putting this into daily use.

I would like to learn sometime how to remove the catarac. I've read it involves removing the CRT, and using a heat gun to get rid of the old seal around the bonded safty glass. However as far as what to use to reset the glass, I'm not sure. I'm also weary of doing CRT removal and re-installation. I feel like I'm handling a live bomb after the experience I had having one implode within 5 feet of me....that was nerve racking.

Got any suggestions on what to use for tuner contact cleaner? The VHF tuner contacts are full of crap. The fine tuning is also has a really grungy feeling to it.