http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=12&item=7309422687&rd=1

In litchfield, IL which is near St. Louis. Very interesting auction, as the seller has recorded his voice for auction description.

Probably has a toasted fly if its a ctc38. Lets face it, if the TV worked the picture would not be any good like the seller says, its old technology.

I ran across his listing as well. The talking ad startled me! And yes... Let's face it, it would not have the quality of a NEW set. HA I got po'd on that one. He's making the mistake of thinking that someone is going to want in for the BEE-YOU-TI-FUL cabinet and the record player. He'll have a surprise. Ain't no-one but a tv collector that will want the whole thing. There's too many console stereo's out there that you can't GIVE away let alone have a non-working tv to go with it. Also per his description, what's up with people thinking you can get EVERY part you need at Radio Shack? DO any of you guys get alot of parts there? The last time I was in one, they didn't have shit.

I thought the sound description was cool, and give him credit - his terms are good too.

CTC-38? Yeah, they always got a bad rap though the one my grandma had was nice WHEN it worked.

Wasn't there a few upgrades that came out afterwards that improved those sets a lot, reliabilitywise?

Hmm, can you even get a replacement flyback for them?

I'm kind of wondering what his reserve is tho? He starts the listing at a $1.00 but am assuming the reserve could be high. I've been checking around and it appears no-one has the flybacks anymore. I have 1 source left to hear from. From what I remember from my repairman Uncle, and other techs that worked on them (they were our bread & butter for service calls in 1979) that chassis was cheaply made. It was the last tubed chassis in an RCA console. (along with the CTC-39) It did have some primitive solid state areas in the IF I think, but it was an obsolete chassis that was full of 6GH8's and RCA's flyback design was terrible. This chassis had a higher failure rate because RCA had the high-voltage set up higer on it then they did on previous chassis (CTC 16,25,31) for a sharper picture and the flyback couldn't take it. The only improvement was to NOT replace it with an RCA flyback. We always used Thordarson (Fly-312) which had a much better coating. It was an instance where it was better NOT to use a genuine RCA part. I remember a few sets that had a fantastic picture, but for the most part the CTC-38/39 were not durable at ALL.

Wow - I've never seen a talking eBay auction before - interesting, while incredibly annoying at the same time. It took me a good 20 seconds to figure out what that talking was coming from - I was listening to Bad Religion music from .mp3, and this talking was overlapping. I thought my cobbled together stereo system was picking up AM radio again...

(That was funny in and of itself, I was getting some weird "all preaching, all the time" religious station in the stereo - something to do with a bad connection or bad ground reference between the computer and the ancient Panasonic quadraphonic receiver I use instead of those cheap crap computer speaker things. It was pretty funny for a while - especially since the problem started while listening to Slayer music... Fixed it by re-soldering the leads to the connectors on some of the wiring. But I digress. I have a very bad habit of rambling on and on about some weird tangent that pops into my head, and I completely forget about the original intent of the post - aaah! there I go again!)

Anyway, that is a pretty neat looking console - hope someone can grab it. I also hope that there is some hope for the CTC-38 chassis' in general, since I have a CTC-38 console sitting right here, it's chassis is out and on the workbench in the basement to do some short-circuit tracing. I certainally hope the flyback is good. It's not burnt looking, but, it would be just my luck that it's got an internal short. Is there a way to add a layer of coating to the RCA flyback to prevent it from burning out, or some sort of preventative maintainance? If the flyback is good, I want to find some way to help keep it that way, since once I get this set going, I want to be able to use it a lot - it's a nice set, and I figure it'll be a nice looking set to use until I can find a color roundie.

-Ian

(Forgive the ramblings of a madman. At least I'm sane enough to know that I'm insane, which is a good indicator of sanity. I think.)

I was talking about CTC-38 and here it is.

This is slightly off topic but re: radio shack: yes Radio shack has saved the day on a few occasions. Needed a potentiometer switch for a replacement tone pot on a 30's Philco Radio...R.S. had it. Also blew the 3/4 amp slow blow fuse on a Seeburg juke box when the coin switch jammed and the local RS had it.

If you go to a Radio Shack in a small town particularly out West, you can often find all kinds of things that the big city stores do not carry anymore, from reel to reel tape, computer cassettes and cassette players, logic chips, phono styli and tubes, etc.

But yes, you're right, most things we do have to get from distributors.

I have a CTC-39 which came out of a school where it was still being used in the early 90's. It had shorted power supply diodes, fixed those and got a great picture. We had one in the library at the middle school in the late 80's where they would tape education programs from public TV and this CTC-39 ran all day long. Still remember the "hot transformer insulation" smell it gave off from the flyback.

I have put a 6 volt lamp bulb in series with the cathode of the HO tube...this allows me to tune up the efficiency coil for least current (lowest brightness) plus, the lamp should burn out on an overload. A 1/2 amp fast blow fuse also would be a good idea (some RCA portables used a thermal fuse near the HO tube to open the cathode if the temperature got too high, other portables hooked the cathode up to the power circuit breaker to open the AC line if cathode current got to high...rget should have used these safety precautions on the consoles, too.)