This is written in a humorous tone, but was curious to see if anyone out there during that time frame that was in repairs, had the same issues, and wondering if you have any of those sets today if you have the same problems. I still collect and have a basement full of old sets, so I am not making fun of anyone who has a certain type or fondness for a set I'm ranting about. This was just how it was thru my eyes in the 70's, having to go out on repair calls and keep these daily watchers going. Also, share your experiances!

RCA-- for the most part, not bad, but come summertime, it was back to back flyback replacement, with the CTC-38/39 being the most god-awful set they ever put out.

Zenith --- Not bad, and for the most part trouble-free, but when they did develop an issue, it seemed to be something weird and time consuming.

Motorola --- UGH! For the few that were around then, the most horrid picture on a TV I ever saw. Fleshtones were NEVER right.

Motorola/Quasar --- If you looked at one crosseyed there would be a bad module, or some damn intermittant problem. The modules were expensive then, and getting hard to come by the early 80's

GE--- Another horrid one that was slightly better than a Motorola tube set, but not by much.

Any "house" brand ---- Bradford,Coronado,Trutone,JC Penney... Hard to get parts for. At that time, if it was a "specific" part that was not generic, you had to go thru them to get the part, and man.. they charged a ton.

Thoughts? Opinions?

I started in '80, so I saw a LOT of CTC-38s, and plenty of roundies of all brands still in good service... My most hated set back then: Magnavox. Always a bad flyback, and horribly difficult to pull the chassis on the combo units without skinning fingers trying to dismount the tuner. I was doing all field service at first, so I didn't have any troubleshooting problems to deal with. If it was more that bad tubes or quick bad solder connections, I was to pull the chassis and haul it in. The boss wanted housecalls limited to 30 minutes if possible.

The CTC-16 & 38 was probably the bread & butter set, as there were so many of them and usually the same problems. Chassis pull was <5 minutes, and super-easy to carry with the tuner service-mounted.

Charles

Charles, I agree...
I forgot to include Magnavox, as we didn't have many on the route, but man.. the ones we did..dogs! Of course what kept those in service (along with a few others) was that the lady of the house, usually had the house decorated in a certain style, and if that TV matched, they would pump more money into that set than it was worth. Magnavox had the nicest cabinets, but in my opinion, not good sets at all.

We had a Magnavox 1972 Model. It was not a bad set though it required a new Crt in about 5 years and a tube here and there. Luckily my dads best friend was a TV repairman. It blew a themistor in 1984. We went out and bought an new RCA 25" colortrack set fron Phil & Jims(Cerritos, CA). That lasted until 2004 when my parents moved to Arizona. They gave it away still working great. Right about the Magnavox cabinets, All real wood. The new RCA was all crappy press-board with fake wood veneer. Got it wet even for a moment, it would bubble up.

I repaired TVs for a brief time in the 70s, and I also found RCA to be not bad, but the flys did seem to attract more than their share of humidity. I like working on them. Ditto on the Zeniths. Then there's the accursed Motorola's. Can't stand them. Sylvania was another brand that seemed rather easy to diagnose and repair, and we had a nearby Sylvania parts jobber that stocked just about any part you could want, and if they didn't have it in stock, it could be obtained quickly. My father in law had a D-11 for about 24 years, and I repaired it twice: The famous 5, and a UHF tuner. When it finally crapped out, we junked it, as the boards were just about cooked.
Love the RCA's from the 50's. Easy to work on, and the reward is usually a decent picture.

This is about what Im seeing with my massive collection of tube color sets. The RCA flys dont seem to be as bad as mentioned, maybe because its not that hot and humid here. The Zeniths are tough to fix, I have some I still cant get the HV regulation and color working right on.
I worked in a tv repair shop in the late 80s and it was mostly early solid state stuff. We changed a bunch of those T03 horizontal output transistors. (I cant remember the NTE number but there were around $13) Then we would bring it up on the variac while watching the E current. If it was cool we let it run for a few hours then shipped it. It was a bad day when the thing reshorted an hour later. We also changed lots of tripplers.
The Zeniths were always put at the back of the line because they were almost never a quick fix.
We also repaired VCRs, what a waste of my life that was! Changing belts and rollers, cleaning heads and replacing that LED that sticks up inside the tape.

It was a garage operation but the guy always had 5 sets a day to work on. $25 to check it out and it was usually under $50 out the door repaired.

I have never even seen a ctc38, they must have all died before my time. I currently have a 16, 17, 25 and 35. Those seem to be the most common survives.

...

While I wasn't around in the 70's, I'm surprised no one has mentioned RCA's tube, and hybrid series string portable sets from the late 60's-early 70's.
Yeah, the CTC-22 in particular was a real turkey.:yuck: It'd pop that SS damper diode at the drop of a hat. oc

While I wasn't around in the 70's, I'm surprised no one has mentioned RCA's tube, and hybrid series string portable sets from the late 60's-early 70's. Every one I've seen has had touchy vertical and horizontal sync, and those low focus voltage CRTs look awful after a few years. I have several that I've changed a load of bad resistors and caps in, and they're still touchy. They're nowhere near as stable as their predecessors.

Any seasoned tech that touched those RCA's kept their stock of 120K, 180K and 220K resistors at the ready, along with the 5GH8's and 13GF7's.

As for RCA flybacks, yes, the humidity was an issue, and the same for the early RCA rectangular yokes - we changed quite a few with corroded windings. We'd give them a blast of Humiseal when we did CRT jobs - no sense in seeing the set again in the summer...

We never seemed to have much trouble getting parts, thanks to four distributors - one RCA, one GE, and two with the other lines. The exception was Magnavox. The big Magnavox "monopolistic" retailer here had the parts locked up as well, so we often replaced knobs at costs approaching 20 bucks a knob....in the 70s. Our knob box became a real asset at times. We also saw a lot of Asian sets, more so than a lot of other shops, as we were in an area with 12 military bases within a 25 mile radius. Lots of odd stuff, kept us busy for sure.

The early Solid state sets with the 2SC1172Bs and the 2SC1308Ks were our bread and butter in the late 70s, along with the Sylvania and Philco sets with regulator problems, most of which were caused by frequent summer lightning storms. We serviced tube sets well into the 90s.

Here's some trivia: MCM Electronics was started by three guys, and they used their initials as the company name. I remember their early catalogs - two pages! NTE started out as New Tone Electronics, with similar offerings back then. Any one remember Fuji-Svea? We used to get the "big iron" transistors from them - NEC, Hitachi, and Toshiba audio outputs - all at crazy low prices. Real stuff - no counterfeits back then. Even their SG613's were the real deal, not seconds. Sourcing parts was fun!

Cheers,

RCA-- for the most part, not bad, but come summertime, it was back to back flyback replacement, with the CTC-38/39 being the most god-awful set they ever put out.



My grandmother had a CTC39xx (it said that on the Sams). New around 1975. And a service contract for it. Saw some of the paperwork, once a pilot light for the channel numbers was replaced. She watched TV a lot, whenever we came to pay a visit grandma had to watch some soap opera around 1PM for a half hour. Was in college then, and back at college I mentioned to some of the girls of the floor of the dorm my grandma watched the same soap they were talking about. "Oh, the episode when the guy was in the hospital? I missed that one, do you remember what happened?" course not, I didn't know the background of the plot and so on.

Grandma checked out years later, and we ended up with it. It still worked, UHF worked but VHF was dead (obviously the VHF local oscillator tube must have been weak), but my brother tossed it.

Sounds like you guys had fun. Unfortunately for me, I didnt get started until recently, so I have my own new sets of issues today. like CHINA, but thats another story.........

Any "house" brand ---- Bradford,Coronado,Trutone,JC Penney... Hard to get parts for. At that time, if it was a "specific" part that was not generic, you had to go thru them to get the part, and man.. they charged a ton.



Somewhere I have a copy of a letter, written in obvious frustration, to Western Auto. The tech was trying to find a part for what, at the time, was a fairly late model Truetone color console, probably a W-G.

In a pile of tubes I bought were a bunch of Truetone branded tubes and they were all some pretty weird series string types.

I missed the real "fun". I just recall the monthly visits, all through the 70s, from the TV repairman who patched together our General Electric KE chassis color console. I didn't have to pay the bill, of course, so I always loved it! Sometimes I got to sneak around back and see inside...

ctcn38 's were my favorite set. 3rd if transistors, inverter transistors for the agc, tuners, a few flybacks, plus 6GH8 tubes and they were repaired.

Zenith high voltage regulation problems were always solved by changing the VDR in the regulation circuit. part # 63-9068
I made a group of $$$ while in the business and I was not overcharging.

The best sets were Zenith and RCA.

I missed the fun too but I remember the tv man's regular visits to my dad's CTC25 and yes I remember it getting it's flyback getting replaced at least once. My mom had the troublesome solid state Sears/ warwick console that needed the yearly visit by the Sears repairman. It had a problem that was never cured where the sound would go at the best part of the show and you had to hit it on the side to get it back.

My grandmother had a solid state GT Matic Sylvania and it never broke down until lightning got it in 1984. And my uncle's hybrid 1869 Zenith combo was equally trouble free.My grandmother on my dad's side used b/w tvs until her death and hardly ever had tv troubles.

For the most part everything he says is true. Although the Ge sets were pretty staight foward repairs unti they started using double sided boards on some models.

There is a reason why Motorola got out of television and I agree with their decision. The best part of any Motorola was the cabinet.

Rca was always a leader and the flyback was always their weak point.

Other sets in the same category as Motorola were Packard Bell, Some of the Sears models. Oh and don't forget Admiral's they were basically in the same class as Motorola, never remember seeing good pictures on them after they stopped using the Rca chassis put in their cabinets.

Some Sears sets were a pain to keep working. Our neighbors Sears console was always on the Fritz. Seems like every week there was something or other. It was from the late 60's or so. All tube. Not sure who made it. May have been Toshiba. I had inherited my grandma's Sears 20" color portable. It only weighed 10 kilotons. It was an all tube set built by Toshiba. The TV repairman that was at our house to repair our maggie said it was a dog. I could never get a good focus out of it.

My parents had a 19" Sears color set that they bought around 1975 (their first color set!), and it lasted until 1991 with only ONE repair, a scratchy volume control that I replaced myself while I was still in high school. I think the chassis was actually a Toshiba, rebranded by Sears. Finally the CRT gave out, but the set didn't owe them a thing after ~16 years of daily use.

I worked in TV shops for a few years in the mid to late 80's, and the ones I remember seeing a lot of were:

Zeniths--Burned up 9-160 modules on the newer ones (we rebuilt the boards in-house), or open 4-legged caps on the older vertical chassis sets. Remember changing a few HV triplers, as well.

GE--Constant problems with the "griplets" used instead of plated-through holes on the double-sided PC boards.

RCA--Poor soldering particularly on the varactor tuner cans. And more than a few bad flybacks.

Sony--The usual "chain reaction" horizontal/power supply failure. The 2 SG613 GCS thyristors, plus the smaller one in the low voltage PS.

Magnavox/Sylvania/Philips--4 legged cap would go open, causing the HV to go to 50-60 kV. Usually arced right through the CRT neck into the yoke windings, neatly cutting the neck off the tube.

Sharp--Hardly a week would go by without one of these things on the bench. Poor flyback design would arc internally, sometimes burning through the case near the focus/G2 pots. Usually took out Horiz output, and PS regulator SCR. Sets apparently caused several home fires, and manufacturer provided new flybacks and a dozen other parts as a "meltdown kit" for free on certain models.

This is about what Im seeing with my massive collection of tube color sets. The RCA flys dont seem to be as bad as mentioned, maybe because its not that hot and humid here. The Zeniths are tough to fix, I have some I still cant get the HV regulation and color working right on.
I worked in a tv repair shop in the late 80s and it was mostly early solid state stuff. We changed a bunch of those T03 horizontal output transistors. (I cant remember the NTE number but there were around $13) Then we would bring it up on the variac while watching the E current. If it was cool we let it run for a few hours then shipped it. It was a bad day when the thing reshorted an hour later. We also changed lots of tripplers.
The Zeniths were always put at the back of the line because they were almost never a quick fix.
We also repaired VCRs, what a waste of my life that was! Changing belts and rollers, cleaning heads and replacing that LED that sticks up inside the tape.

It was a garage operation but the guy always had 5 sets a day to work on. $25 to check it out and it was usually under $50 out the door repaired.

I have never even seen a ctc38, they must have all died before my time. I currently have a 16, 17, 25 and 35. Those seem to be the most common survives.
ecg 165 and 238 were the replacement numbers

The business model today that is analogous to TV repair is PC servicing.

We make more house calls/business calls than accept PC's the customer brings to us.
Most times we can fix it on site but many times take more than 30 minutes. Sometimes I think that the cost to travel to the customers site, spend 30min to 1hr to examine the PC, and taking it back to the shop is not worth it - you can purchase a new PC for less. But the data copying, software installation, and deboxing/setup of a new PC is also time consuming.

I wonder if you TV repair guys in the 1970s charging $25 to travel to, spend 30 minutes looking over, removing chassis, travel to shop, repair time, parts, and take back and setup ... did you really make much money??

Carl

The business model today that is analogous to TV repair is PC servicing.


I wonder if you TV repair guys in the 1970s charging $25 to travel to, spend 30 minutes looking over, removing chassis, travel to shop, repair time, parts, and take back and setup ... did you really make much money??

Carl

I know 7 TV repairmen - guys that owned (and some still own) their own shops in the 70's - 90's. None of them are rich, and all will tell you they made money in the 70's and 80s, up until the advent of the disposable set, often called BPC around here.

Thanks to the ubiquity of the RCA "clone sets," all one had to do was get proficient on the most common problems. I won an old tube caddy on eBay a few years ago. It was funny because all of the stuff in it was the same stuff we carried back in the day - replacement circuit breakers, belfuses, degaussing "nickels", tuner bulbs, a few pigtail fuses, some 1KV power supply diodes, tunerlube (grease - not spray!) and knob springs. Those parts, plus a good supply of RCA, Zenith, and Admiral specific tubes, and you could just about service 90% of the sets in the home - it was the 10% you had to pull that you possibly didn't make much money off of, but it evened out in the end. I've gone on many $18.50 service calls in the past where we fixed the set in the home, and often the customer had another for us to take in for repair, or we were given the set for parts. We made money either way.


Cheers,

$25 would barely pay for the gas to get the van to the customers home and back to the shop today.
I bet it was a decent living.

I've gone on many $18.50 service calls in the past where we fixed the set in the home, and often the customer had another for us to take in for repair, or we were given the set for parts. We made money either way.




This goes along with what Howard Sams prodded shops to do: "Ask, what else needs fixing?" For years that was plastered on their folders, and the last TV shop I cleaned out had a sticker with that motto prominently located behind the counter.

The TV repairmen I've met may not have been rich, but most of them live in very nice ranchers built in the 60s/70s.

Back in the early 1970's, gas was under $1 a gallon, generally about 65cents, a new service van might cost $3000...probably less. So it was easier to make a profit.

RCA CTC-38 There were so many sold that there was a disperporitonate number of failures. Shopping carts of 6GH8A’s, flybacks, and 25XP22’s.

Zenith Arc and Spark in the High Voltage box. If the customer said the set was in the basement I was shear to bring the dental tools and corona dope.

Motorola Does NOT works in a drawer! I was never able to shop just the chassis!

Motorola Does NOT works in a drawer! :lmao: Now that is funny. What a great line. Look!!!! I have one and it works. But not sure how long...

GE Does Not Give Performance Television. (Big Grins). GE did give smoke well and excelled on Fire too.

RCA CTC-38 There were so many sold that there was a disperporitonate number of failures. Shopping carts of 6GH8A’s, flybacks, and 25XP22’s.

Zenith Arc and Spark in the High Voltage box. If the customer said the set was in the basement I was shear to bring the dental tools and corona dope.

Motorola Does NOT works in a drawer! I was never able to shop just the chassis!

Very curious, since I am getting into restoring a Zenith color roundie - What would you use a dental tool for?

Scraping dirt and carbon tracks off I'd imagine .....

If only I could write a book based on experiences of tube and solder jockeys, I would travel all over to do the interviews. Most of the TV-Radio guys in this corner of PA were veterans who learned electronics during WWII and Korea. I learned alot from these fellas as the vast majority were honest and shrewd buisnessmen. The 50's-70's really was a good time to make a living doing this. A new B&W cost $170 and the average repair was 35 bucks, the 19" color sets started at $380 and most repairs were under $100. Many stuck it out when transistors/modules replaced tubes, but left the business in the era of one-board chassis and black box TV's.

I also installed many antennas as I was the "young-un" that was crazy enough to climb roofs and towers. A Winegard antenna with a Blonder-Tongue mast amp and Alliance U-100 rotor was the workhorse setup that lasted. Rural areas were "cabled" in the mid-80's and that ended quick.

I first worked on TV's that were tossed in the trash dump or at the curb in mid-70's and soon after worked in "the business". I first worked for place that sold GE because they also sold appliances and sold Magnavox along with thier furniture. I also worked at places that sold Zenith, RCA, Sony, Panasonic, Sylvania and Admiral (until '77). We still looked at anything that was brought in. We dreaded anything from a department store like Sears, etc. Even the RCA's sold at discount stores were a variant of the ones sold by RCA dealers.

We called GE: "good enough" or "generaous electric"and porta color was "sorta color" GE got by on reducing component counts, compactron 12 pin tubes and cutting out some functions altogether. One positive, you could always get parts at a reasonable price and they were so simple you could always fix em. The CRTs always went soft early.

We called Magnavox: maggotbox due to the generally fuzzy pictures and poor color due to soft CRTs, The later chassis from 1976-on were better and usually only had bad solder joints.

I agree to the letter with the by-brand problem descriptions. with one slight exception: I still have a 1968 Motorola tube set (not Quasar) that produced an excellent picture including flesh tones, once the old Motorola CRT was replaced. That set needs a focus resistor now.

I was in high school in the 1970's and we had a vocational electronics class that culminated in TV repair. We fixed small appliances, radios, car radios, stereos, as well as B&W and color TV sets from the 50's through the 70's brought in by students and teachers. We wouldn't allow sets from anyone not connected with the school. A few times TV shops gave us collections of old sets they had been storing that were more costly to fix than their customers were willing to pay. We sometimes combined working CRT's with chassis whose CRT's had gone out, converged them and gave them away. We fixed easy and difficult issues, never butchered a set, and had an arrangement with a shop for the tough dogs. We only charged for parts unless it went to the shop with the arrangement. Parts were very easy to get.

Our class had a full compliment of test equipment: O'scopes, Sencore CRT tester rejuvinator, Sencore tube tester, marker generator, etc.

I had a ball!!!!! :banana: Wished I'd been born 20 years sooner.

I used that experience to land a job as a bench tech for an electronics mfr (when there was such a thing in America), for whom I worked for 8 years. I now work in network design for a Fortune 500 company.

Magnavox/Sylvania/Philips--4 legged cap would go open, causing the HV to go to 50-60 kV. Usually arced right through the CRT neck into the yoke windings, neatly cutting the neck off the tube.
I had that happen to an 80 Magnavox about 2 yrs after the crt and tuner were replaced that thing was a pita .

Our class had a full compliment of test equipment: O'scopes, Sencore CRT tester rejuvinator, Sencore tube tester, marker generator, etc.

I had a ball!!!!! :banana: Wished I'd been born 20 years sooner.
I used that experience to land a job as a bench tech for an electronics mfr (when there was such a thing in America), for whom I worked for 8 years. I now work in network design for a Fortune 500 company.[/QUOTE]

Vo-tech (78-81) was my favorite time in the public school system. :smoke: We had a teacher that was in the Air National Guard Reserves. He separated the goofballs from the serious freaks:bash:; The burnouts repaired tape players and car stereos and WE learned the basics - ohms law, AC circuit theory, amplifiers, tubes, transistors, oscillators ...etc, but I was one of a few who bothered with TV's. The shop had a B&K 1077B television analyst, which really helped you zero-in on the problem. It was sooo much fun when you didn't need to make a living at it. :D I worked for TI in Dallas after tech school. Everybody near Dallas seemed to have old Zeniths! A long and winding road brought me to electrical power engineering for the state GS dept.

I was not only in vocational electronics class, but I worked at a shop as well as "on the side" back in the seventies. There was plenty of work, and I didn't have to advertise for myself either. I'd do house calls for 10 bucks and made good money with CRT and flyback jobs. I saw lots of Zeniths/RCAs followed by everything else. I'd fix some B&Ws and repaired sets for resale too. Have tube caddy will travel!

You had to have a good relationship with the wholesale suppliers but they didn't mind "cash" customers! I did a lot of business with my Sylvania jobber.

I think it must have been some "mandatory" requirement that your High School Electronics Teacher had some military experience as well as being of "character"! :D

If they had had electronics and/or TV repair in my high school (in Chicago in the mid-to-late 1970s), I might have stuck around there even. Instead, that is what I tinkered with when I was cutting classes! :para:

No vocational classes were offered at my high school - all college prep curriculum. One year I was forced to choose between theater and ceramics. Mein Gott. I can't tell you how perfectly natural it felt to fail that ceramics class.

only tech prep/vocational class i had was IT. i chose between IT/Broadcasting Arts/CAD. So i went with IT.

no such thing as electronics anymore. Maybe in china, not here...

Graduated from a Vo-Tech HS, where I majored in electronics. During freshman year, you were exposed to 8 different career fields, 2 per semester, then you declared a major for the next 3 years. In addition to electronics, I learned a bit of carpentry, machine shop, plumbing, HVAC, auto mechanics, auto body, and welding. All useful skills, and certainly helpful in reducing the number of times I have put a car in the shop or call a repairman in to fix something around the house. TV repair was a good chunk of the curriculum, and took up about half of Junior year. We had a couple specially built training sets (one RCA-based, one Zenith-based), where the instructor could induce various problems by means of a lockable "control panel" built into the side of the cabinet. We also fixed a lot of sets for faculty and students, at no charge except parts at cost.

Of course, the school is no longer a Vo-Tech school anymore. Teaching people how to actually build and repair things apparently became obsolete in the "new economy". :screwy:

Bout 3-4 years back I had a PLTW (project lead the way) Digital electronics course in my junior year of HS. It was really fun! My class mates were always cracking wise and jokeing around. Our teacher was a hard ass, but put up with and even joked along with the class. I remember supriseing him good when after having missed two of the three classes in which we were suposed to finish building the kit (this kit would be needed for all future projects) I built nearly the whole thing in one class and took only a few minutes in the after school session (which was to get the slower kids caught up). The guy was totally suprised that I knew how to solder that kit together so fast. I learned a bunch of interesting things about digital circuits (most of what we learned was AOI logic and counter/timer circuits using 74 series logic).

I really got alot out of that class. In fact not long before started we useing flip-flops and timers alot of the kids were wanting to make the 7-segment display count, and I went ahead and built this Rube Glodbergien AOI logic monstrousity that could actually count to about 8 (because the damn thing used so many chips it would overload the power supply if I added the circuits to count higher! :eek:). The teacher took one look at the hand drawn schematic and said "I'm not going to even try to understand how it works", and he used to work on this stuff for a living!

Sorry to go off topic. The recient posts just reminded me of that time and got me all nostalgic.

Tom C.

When i was in collage for electronics, I had one teacher in DC Electronics that was jelous of me, and everything that I did. he was also ex-military and ran his classroom with an attitude like it was the military...

Anyway, anytime i would get my lab for the day completed, I would pull out something of my own personal stash to work on, which at the time was a scanning disc TV circuit (was into that stuff at the time), and he got on to me that i needed to focus and worry about what needs to be done now, and not something else... pissed me off... oh well. So even though i got the lab for the day done, he didnt want me working on something more advanced than what the other students were doing, (i was being questioned about it by others..) I guess it pissed him off too. LOL so he ended up giving me more paperwork to do for that day...

Never had an issue with anyone else from any of my classes. Just him... But the funny thing is, further in time, one of my other teachers wanted me to bring my project in for open house. Which was a color RGB scanning disc set that I had run off a CD player, etc... I had a knob for everything, Red gain, Green gain, Blue gain, Tint, sync level, etc...

Of course when i went back to pick it up at the end of the day, the DC electronics teacher couldnt stop playing with it. Ironic....

I started messing around with TV's in the mid 1960's. I was around 11 years old. I went to work in a real shop in 1975, and had a blast. Opened my own shop in 1979. I have fond memories of Sylvania tube chassis with lots of overheated resistors in the Y circuitry, lots of RCA flybacks, along with Maggotboxes. I remember replacing disc capacitors in the AF circuits on portable RCAs. We rebuilt alot of Motorola modules, and Zeniths... 9-160's and vertical modules, mostly, Oh yes, the early 70's RCA consoles with the MAH (or similar) modules where the module connectors would break if you looked at them wrong!!

I vividly remember taking in a full size Maggie entertainment center that took up all of the room on the sales floor, fixing it, and getting the aroma of hot urine allover the space. Seems that a cat used the set for its toilet. The owner couldn't be contacted right away, so we sat it outside and let it play for a day, until the stench went away. The set stayed with me for over 2 weeks before we got in touch with the owners, who then finally came and got it a few days later. During this time, I obsessed about it getting scratched, as other than the urine, the thing looked mint. I was so happy when it was gone, and the check cleared.

I never took an entertainment center into the shop again after that. I usually repaired them in the home, or pulled the chassis.

...I have fond memories of Sylvania tube chassis with lots of overheated resistors in the Y circuitry,...
Ha. Did you get any of those hybrid Sylvanias with the 2-watt collector load resistors on the two demod transistors? The resistors were carbon comp, and ran pretty hot to begin with. Over time their phenolic casing would carbonize, creating a low resistance shunt that would run hotter and hotter till one of the transistors would pop and the other was about ready to pop. We replaced each resistor with two 2-watters in series, doubling the wattage rating (and of course replaced both transistors).

Sorry for the long delay in replying to you...

I rarely got a hybrid Sylvania set, but one that I did get to keep, was a 19" with no color. The B/W image was perfect, though. I never got into it enough to fix it. Eventually used the CRT in another set.

I never saw any hint of color in anything we viewed on this set. Too bad, as it was a nice looking set.

...I rarely got a hybrid Sylvania set, but one that I did get to keep, was a 19" with no color. The B/W image was perfect, though...

I never saw any hint of color in anything we viewed on this set.
That's exactly the symptom you'd get if both demod transistors were popped. If only one was popped (the usual condition), you'd get really weird color with half the chroma information missing.