Capehart Farnsworth 461P

[Ampico-kid]

Just finished working on a Capehart/Farnsworth 461P 1950 set, or at least that's the date on the Sams Info Packet. Interesting because it has channel 1. That's very late to find a channel 1. Maybe this was a holdover from an earlier set?

This was a fairly straight forward restoration, but a little daunting at first glance. It has 37 tubes and loads and loads of caps everywhere you look. I bought the set locally for $40, but it had no tubes except for the crt, which turned out to be gassy. Luckily I had 30 of the 37 tubes, and was able to pick up a very good 10BP4 from a VK member at a reasonable price. There were no serious issues with this old timer, just the usual caps, out of tolerance resistors, and an open video peaking coil that I was able to repair.

I was surprised at the sharpness and clarity of the picture. One interesting feature is the speaker grill which is not cloth, but rather perforated metal, and then woodgrained to look like wood. To access the controls on the HV chassis (vert. height, linearity, width, etc.) which is located on the bottom of the cabinet, you push the grill on the bottom front to open it into the set and then utilize the controls. When finished, you swing the grill back and let it latch back into it's normal position. The cabinet has seen better days unfortunately. There is no moisture damage, just lots of dings and scrapes and sun fade. It also looks like at some point in it's life someone had the bright idea to antique it using some brown paint. The attempt was made to streak it onto the cabinet to make it look like woodgrain. It didn't work very well I'm afraid. But....I decided that I was going to leave the cabinet as is and consider it's battle scars part of it's history.

Here are some pictures of the cabinet, chassis and screen shots.













Here are a few shots of the chassis:



Audio Amp and Power Supply



High Voltage Supply



Main Chassis





Main Chassis installed in the set.




Overall it was an interesting experience. I always find it very rewarding to find something like this that would have little hope of survival, if it weren't for an enterprizing group of people like us to see the potential, and then follow through until we bring them back to life again. Now on to the next challenge........Bob