I no longer have Orson Welles tape.

You'll probably have better luck finding someone with a working deck than resuscitating one yourself. First place I would start is this website:

http://www.angelfire.com/alt/cartrivision/

Check with the guy who put the site up; he appears to have one or access to one (You might not have found it if you were googling "Cartravision" rather than "Cartrivision.")

There are also commercial vendors who specialize in obsolete videotape playback and restoration; you'll spend some money but given the situation and the value of your material, it would probably be well spent. Best of luck with it.

Also search Cartrivision on this site for old threads on the subject - but none that would help repair one, I'm afraid -- good luck, and let us know how you progress.

Abc

I bought one from Olson electronics in the 1970's and was able to get it to work using a small B/W Sony TV monitor with video/audio out and used a modulator to send the COLOR signal to any color TV. The Sony monitor had a wide enough bandwidth to receive color. I highly recommened you get hold of someone who has a working one and will dub them for you, Even tapes recorded on the playback machine would have hooking problems at the top of the screen. You need someone familiar with the skip field system AVCO used.
Good Luck
Richard

Sorry, I don't know how the units were connected to the TV when they were built in. At Motorola, we evaluated stand-alone units, but Motorola eventually decided against marketing any Cartrivision either stand alone or built in.

I bought one from Olson electronics in the 1970's and was able to get it to work using a small B/W Sony TV monitor with video/audio out and used a modulator to send the COLOR signal to any color TV. The Sony monitor had a wide enough bandwidth to receive color. I highly recommened you get hold of someone who has a working one and will dub them for you, Even tapes recorded on the playback machine would have hooking problems at the top of the screen. You need someone familiar with the skip field system AVCO used.
Good Luck
Richard

I agree that finding a working one would be the best bet.

One note of encouragement: "Hooking" at the top of the picture due to horizontal sync mistiming was visible mainly due to the slow horizontal AFC in TV sets at the time (done for best off-air performance). Later TV sets (and VCR/DVD recorder dual decks) have been built with faster AFC to accomodate the horizontal mistiming that may occur with any home VTR. So, I expect you could get reasonable playback into a modern TV set or DVD recorder.

Abc

Everybody I showed the chassis and "fish tank" electronics to thought I was crazy. How was a 16 year old kid going to get color tv programs with a black and white TV as the receiver. I was lucky, mine came with the camera and using a modulator I could trace out the video/audio in's and outs and even taped my cat to be sure I had the wires hooked up right. Those vidicon cameras neaded a LOT of light. Then I hooked up the video out of the 5 inch B/W monitor and hit record and pause and a color picture came up on the 19 inch monitor. First program I taped to show off to my friends was of course Star Trek. About 5 people came over, I crossed my fingers and pushed the lever for the play button and after about 30 seconds was a pretty good picture of Capt. Kirk. Everybody in the room wanted me to buy them one and make it work. Sorry, not without a supply of TV's with A/V out and inputs. A couple of years later Betamax came out for something like $1,700.00. It could be cool to be a nerd back then.
Richard

Abc

Here's another site at Labguy's World (http://www.labguysworld.com/Museum017.htm) that you might find useful.

Also you might want to check in at the oldvtrs (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oldvtrs/?v=1&t=search&ch=web&pub=groups&sec=group&slk=1) discussion group at yahoogroups.

--Dave

You may be able to get audio and video directly out of the Cartrivision chassis to feed into a computer video-capture device.

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You have the market cornered! Great to hear that you were able to save all this; hope to hear good updates on the progress.

I should know this, but what make of TV is that?

Wow! You should definitely be able to get at least one working. If you determine it has baseband video and audio, that would be the way to go. If not, using the RF is a reasonable plan B.

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...Something I noticed that I thought was strange, the back of the television has a 75 ohm coaxial cable tv input. I did not know cable television was available in 1972? I am only 32 years old and can remember as a kid having to buy adapters to hook cable tv to newer televisions than this through the vhf antenna input.

They started long before then. The first one was in 1948. There were 70 cable systems in 1952.

There were also other reasons for having a 73ohm input. See the attached image from a 1949 Sylvania manual.

John

The audio in and out is on the connector that does not connect to the transport, the video in and out is on the same connector, I think it is the green one. Look at the wires going to this connector and you will see four shielded wires feeding it, 2 are audio and 2 are video. I hooked up the camera and started to probe the shielded wires center conductor with a small video monitor until I got the image from the camera on the monitor. Then did the same with the audio until I got feedback from camera mic to monitor speaker. Then the inputs were easy to figure out.
GOOD LUCK!
Richard

The 528 in the model number tells who built it-Warwick. I think Sears was their only customer. Later Sanyo took them over. The 312 on the crt means it was made by Sylvania; they sold to many other companies. Just as a TV, if it didn't have the catrivision, it would not be valuable but would be kinda rare...not many have survived. As a combo, a real keeper!

That console is a Warwick and was most likely made in their Forrest City, AR. plant (now Sanyo). It's definitely a keeper. I'll be watching this thread as I have a Cartravision unit I need to get going. Keep us posted on your progress.

Abc

If I remember correctly, it was back in the early 1970's and I was 16 or so there is a switch by the camera input jack for camera or input from tuner connector, make sure it is on camera so it will pass the camera video to the connector you are probing. All my friends thought I was crazy that I could make this pile of wires and chassis record TV in color. The first show I played for my premire was a Star Trek (of course) then they were throwing money at me to buy one for them and wire it up. The hardest part was finding a TV that had video outputs, when I tried to tap the video of a regular TV it would draw down the signal. I would up using a 9 inch B/W Sony monitor and nobody could understand how I was getting color from a B/W tv. Oh yeah I fed the output through a Channel 3/4 modulator.

I was away from here a couple of days - glad to see someone jumped in with some answers.
Baseband composite video and audio is like what is on "RCA phono" connectors, usually red for right audio, white for left audio, and yellow for video on modern gear, but probably not existent on your set. So you have to play around to determine what you have.
Please do keep us informed on your progress.

Edit - I meant the connectors are probably not present, but as Richard D says, the signals are somewhere there on different wires or connectors.

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Did the picture at any time have static or snow in it, or was it always gray no matter what deck you used?

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Anything that old, and mechanical, probably has grease that has solidified into a glue. I'd check that first.

Maybe the camera tube has gone bad? Apparently older vidicon tubes suffer from helium infiltration.

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You should have color for your broadcast material. All of your home movie stuff will be in B&W because of the camera. As the cartravision player is such an odd bird, I hesitate to say what the problem is, but you're basically only getting luma signal and no chroma for your colors. I would try to establish a steady b&w picture first. Are just your home movies showing bad tracking, or are your broadcast tapes doing the same thing?

BTW, this is an amazing thread. You're so close now! Keep at it, as you are sure to get this one running!

Abc

Is there a manual in this mix? Might have some directions? Colorfixer mentioned old grease, which is a possiblity even with the NOS machine-it might be running slightly too slow? But I would explore other options first-I wouldn't be quick to tear into that thing. Hopefully somebody will chime in soon who really knows these machines. I do have a friend who is very good with old/odd formats like this, I'm not sure how to reach him though.

Abc

pictures like what you've posted are due to either errors in head drum or tape feed speed.

Did these machines record direct color or did they process color "under" like VHS et al.

Abc

They record color under.

A unique feature of Cartrivision is that it uses 1-of-3 skip-field recording to save tape, that is, it records only one out of every three video fields for a total of 20 fields per second. This is acceptable when home recording live video, but when home recording broadcasts of 24 frame per second film (which was also much of prime-time programming) it results in jerky motion due to completely losing a film frame 4 times a second. Cartrivision had a method (for pre-recorded movies only) of blending two film frames together 4 times per second. This meant that the motion blurred instead of jumping. This technique required use of a video frame store at the recording site, which was inconceivable to include in a home device at that time.

Another thing that Cartrivision worked on was high-speed duplication of pre-recorded tapes by means of magnetic contact printing.

You'll likely need to use a solvent like varsol to wash the old grease from the mechanism, or at least soften it up enough to be able to free the mechanism, enough to even temporarily allow the machine to play.

You could also have the seized grease in bearings which would cause the mechanism not to run smoothly, or throwing the alignment off.

Abc

I was thinking last night...I wonder if Sams ever did a Photofact on these? Nothing in the index under Avco or Cartrivision, but maybe the Sears model number would trace back to something? Certainly there had to be service lit through Sears which someone out there has. (I have some stuff, but I am 99.99% sure I don't have this)

I haven't had a chance to get on AK for a while, and I am fascinated by the recent information.

Since you have tried several tapes, and several machines, and not had a lot of success (at least with the video part), it might be best to kind of start over with a methodical process, with the playing and transferring of your family tape(s) as the last step.

-Read plenty about the restoring of old electronics, and VCRs specifically if you can find details, here on AK or elsewhere as well.
-All of this equipment is 35 years old, and unused or not, many of the electrolytic capacitors ("caps") have probably gone bad. (The TV picture has bad vertical linearity, for example, and that is probably just one or two bad caps.) Buy or build an ESR meter; they are pretty simple, and they are exactly what you need to (relatively) quickly test every electrolytic cap.
-Pick one machine, and try everything on it (cap checking, lubrication, audio/video in and out connections, etc.), and make notes of everything you do.
-Besides the A/V outputs, connect audio and video inputs on a machine and try recording: Pick one blank tape if you have one (NOT one of your family tapes, and not one of the tapes with prerecorded shows), and do all of your testing with that one tape. Connect the outputs of another A/V device (a regular VCR tuned to a TV station will work until June, or use one of the cheap new digital TV converter boxes). Set the Cartrivision unit into Record mode for about ten minutes, then rewind the tape and play it and see what you get. Most video recorders play their own recordings better than tapes from any other machine; once the machine can record and play its own video, then move on to playing existing tapes. (The reason for this issue is tape drive/head alignment, tape tension, etc. If you have ever had a floppy disk drive that would not read other disks but would write and read its own disks fine, it is the same concept.) If you get anything at all on this tape that you record (sound, video, color, or all), keep using it for more tests (and more recordings) as you go along. Later, move on to possible alignment of the machine to get other tapes playing better. Recorded tapes themselves that have sat for 30+ years can and will deteriorate, stretch, or whatever, so you may never get nearly the quality out of any of the old material compared to that of new recordings, but working this way will eliminate recorded-tape quality issues from problems with the machine itself.
-If you don't already have one, get an oscilloscope. It will make looking at/for the audio and video signals much easier as you work on the equipment.
-Someone somewhere has to have service information on these units still. Besides a plain Google search, try the "groups" search option in Google with the word Cartrivision (and misspelled variants as well). Send messages to any e-mail addresses you find, and to all the owners of the Web sites you find about Cartrivision equipment.

Your existing skills should make all of this easier than for many collectors. Keep us posted on further progress.

Varsol is a cleaning solvent used in the printing industry to dissolve printing inks used in offset lithography (printing). It works very well to dissolve hardened petroleum and organic greases. I used to use it to dissolve the hardened grease that Apple used in their sony oem'ed disc drive mechanisms.

It works almost a well as CFC based cleaners. It is a cleaner/solvent made from a kerosene derivitive and some other unknown materials that presumably fell to earth ;).

What is nice is that it will dissolve old grease with no effort, and dry to leave no residue, without giving the user a buzz.

Abc

Sounds like you found a very helpful and knowledgeable person. I second the "don't use Q-tips or cotton." It took me forever to remove the cotton that caught on the heads in my VCR.

John

If the possibility of bad heads arises, you luckily have a few spare sets lying around! Can the heads just be changed out? I wonder as I had a very old Quasar video tape player (it took some oddball coaxial cartridge, so this is very pre-VHS) and all you had to do was lift the top, twist off a knurled hold down, and the video head drum was free!

Hey! Just thought I'd check before I posted and Labguy has one of these! He's excited about the ez-clean heads too!

http://www.labguysworld.com/Quasar_VR-1000.htm

Another memory of this thing just strikes me-it had a dehumidifier built into it! I guess if you thought your tapes were a bit damp (?) you hit this switch on the front and a very LOUD fan would kick on.