Working CTC-5

[miniman82]

There was a 5 at the ETF this year (well, a chassis and cabinet) that also has 'COLOR' silk screened onto the glass, I wonder how common that was for these sets? The earlier ones never had it, and the later ones had 'COLOR' right on the CRT plastic mask. Wonder if the words being printed onto the glass was an in-between thing?

[Mal Fuller]

Originally Posted by miniman82

There was a 5 at the ETF this year (well, a chassis and cabinet) that also has 'COLOR' silk screened onto the glass, I wonder how common that was for these sets? The earlier ones never had it, and the later ones had 'COLOR' right on the CRT plastic mask. Wonder if the words being printed onto the glass was an in-between thing?

I have a story about that glass. I bought a CTC-5 back in 1960 and fixed it up for my own use. Once, when removing the glass for cleaning, I chipped it. I called the RCA distributor and in spite of the set's being fairly young at that time, it was no longer available. It was slightly tinted, but I settled for a piece of laminated glass sized for me by a glass shop. That's how it went for years.
One night I went to the RCA distributor's place in Portland Maine (Commercial Distributors) for a color TV servicing seminar.
On a desktop was the glass I wanted, complete with the "COLOR" logo. It turned out that nearly every desktop in the building had a CTC-5's safety glass on it! When I tried to buy one, one was gifted to me.
To this day, the clear laminate replacement I had cut is on top of my living room TV's cabinet being used as a protector.

[Steve D.]

Originally Posted by miniman82

There was a 5 at the ETF this year (well, a chassis and cabinet) that also has 'COLOR' silk screened onto the glass, I wonder how common that was for these sets? The earlier ones never had it, and the later ones had 'COLOR' right on the CRT plastic mask. Wonder if the words being printed onto the glass was an in-between thing?

Nick,

You are correct that the early CTC-5 models did not have "COLOR" on the safety glass. A later production run change, until the end of CTC-5 production, had "COLOR" on the glass. Other than that change, the mask on the CTC-5 was the same for its entire run with the exception of the CTC-5 " entry level "Special" series "Aldrich" model
deleted the black painted surround in the mask. The word "COLOR" embedded into the mask, I believe, was first seen on the Mark Series CTC-7 models.

-Steve D.