Hoffmann Colorcaster......Alive and well!

[RCAkid]

Some of you may remember this set. It was on the old swap forum. This past weekend I picked her up in Denver and brought it home on Monday.

I have included the pictures that were put up by Nick (HColorcaster). I will post new pics as soon as I get some done.

Nick said that the last time he saw the set work, the picture was really faded. This set had the "instant on" feature and we all know that is a CRT killer.

So I put the crt on my B&K 467 tester and sure enough, the all three guns were weak on the very low side of weak. Since this crt (25BP22A) is not all that uncommon and since I have a spare, I figured I would give it some voltage and see what happend.

I ran the tube at 8 volts for a couple of hours to see if this had any effect. It did bring the tube up to the high side of weak but still not good enough to track or focus well so I ran the clean/balance procedure. This brought the crt back to life! All three guns are in the high side of the "good" range and the life test shows that there seems to be a good bit of life left in the tube.

Ok, so my next thing was to see what kind of shape the chassis was in. The chassis is definitely an RCA clone. It looks a lot like a modified CTC-16 or it could be a 17 but I am not sure and haven't tracked down a sams for it yet. The audio board is not transistorized so I know the chassis should be based on a pre CTC-21.

I turned on the vacation switch and slowly brought power to it on the variac and all the filaments came up as they should with no problems. I pressed forward, this time bringing up the set slowly to a full on position. Woohoo, I had a beautiful picture! The crt needs some deguassing but aside from that, the color was perfect, the crt was nice, bright and clear and, aside from dirty tuner, worked very well. I was amazed at the picture quality and how well the set worked. The set shows very little evidence of technician work (all screws and interlocks are still with the set too) and judging by the amount of dust and gunk on the set, it does have a good number of hours on it but appears that it has the original crt (an RCA HiLite Tube) and I it's exciting that it is in such good working condition. This one could easily be a daily watcher once restored and I am thrilled!

I am so glad that it didn't get tossed to the trash. It almost was sent there.

While regtangular color sets are not my preferred "antique" tv, I now have 5 rectangular sets (RCA CTC21 (my family set), a Sylvania 23" (my grandparents set), a RCA G2000 (cuz its cool), a Zenith Chromacolor II (cuz it too is cool) and now the Hoffie). This Hoffie is one of those "oddity" specimens and I am sure glad to have her. It would have been a shame for this one to go to the landfill, especially with so much life left in her.

Roy