I just got a remote control Color Admrial
 

A few hours ago I went to Nicks(AKA miniman82) place and bought/was given some nice stuff he wanted to get rid of (I'll probably stop by next week to get more stuff that I couldn't fit in the CRV this trip). Thanks Nick!

I don't have a photo of the Admiral (asside from the ones Nick sent, and I don't want to post them with out his premision), but I'll take some good pictures tomarrow. It seems to work, but there are two things I need to know.

The first is which tubes Will sub for a 6LU8? It is the vert tube and one section is dead(thus no vertical deflection), but worse still I don't have a spare.:tears:

Second What voltage does an Eveready No. E126 battery put out? The hand unit uses one, and I don't have one and probably can't buy one any more.

More questions, and of course pictures tomarrow.

Tom C.

eveready 9V battery. Not sure if there is a substitute fur 6LU8, Don't have my book handy. Somebody else will chime in.

Electronic M (Tom C) are you the guy I saw at the Geneva estate sale who bought the Admiral roundie and Zenith SC200? Just curious, I saw that name written on a peice of tape stuck on the TV and a light fixture when I went back to the sale on Sunday to look for the manuals for the Packard Bell combo.

As for the remote Admiral, I used to own that one, originally it came from Captainmoody. Its a nice set.

Well some good news and some bad news. The good news I replaced the original vert tube for a test of the remote control, and the vert worked good(go figure), and the remote worked good on all functions as well!

The bad news the picture is dim, there is a control shaft that is rolling around inside the cabinet, the volume jumps around, there is hum, and the lytic cans get warm. I'll tackle all this when I get the sams for this set.

If anyone has a scan of the service manual handy it would be a real help.
It is a model LKS6515M Chassis 1H1298-2.

Here are some pictures.
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0757.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0759.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0758.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0747.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0753.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0756.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0760.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0762.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0763.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0761.jpg

Was the button plate of the remote suposed to be brass or chrome?

Tom C.

Doug, Nick did say that he got this set form you, but I did not know captinmoody used to own it.

I haven't had the chance to attend any estate sales in Illinois in the last several years so whoever got that set is not me but has a similar name.

You may or may not remember me as that kid who bought the 1971 Zenith off of you about three years back.
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0744.jpg

Tom C.

You need to replace those electrolytics before you run it again. Your picture is dim probably due to your HV being low due to an iffy PS(Low B+). Testing the CRT is also a good idea before you spend too much time on it. Nice TV though!

I tested the HV and I believe that it is running between 15 and 18KV , not good. There were also some big loud sparks on the HV cage that I'm going to look in to.

The lytics are not hot, just very lightly warm so I'm not badly woried.

Once I get the Sam's for it I'll be going full steam ahead on the resotration.

Tom C.

That HV is way low. Should be around 25KV. Nice TV. I love my admiral roundie. These are built well and of good quality. Should give you many years of good service once restored. Sams 876-1, April 1967

I have at least one spare 6LU8 you're welcome to.

I can mail you a copy of that Sams, I have a spare. I really don't want to go through the trouble of trying to scan it. If interested send me a PM with your address.

Interesting, the remote control receiver chassis (as well as the control itself) use Japanese transistors. Those items must have been imported even if the main chassis was made in USA.

...

I see that set was out of a smoker's home. A lot of yellow grunge on the remote and the control panel.

The remote hand unit has Japan writen on it's bottom so it is a safe guess that the remote chassis was also an import.

Last night I turned down the brightness from max and got 24KV of high voltage, and good picture, but as soon as I turned up the brightness it droped to 16KV, so something is definitly wrong with the HV. The regulator maybe?

Tom C.

I figured that was because perhaps the color was much less consistent from station to station than it was in later years. Also, on the early color TVs I have worked on or owned, the color level in particular has been wildly sensitive to the exact position of the fine-tuning control, so I certainly have had to adjust the color knob regularly as I changed channels or fine tuned.

Maybe pushing that bottom button on the left steps the channel up while the button on the right steps the power/volume control?

Tom,

I have a spare 6LU8 (vert osc/output) tube you can have, it's sitting in that box you accidentally kicked over in my spare bedroom. lol

As for the sparks, it could be a bad regulator like the Sylvania set I gave my brother (it had gone to air), or it might be a bad rectifier or decomposed HV wiring. Just run it with the back off, and look for trouble.

BTW: another member will be stopping by on Sunday to have a look at the sets, so make sure you get here early! He said he wants the RCA B&W set, but he may be hungry for more...

....

All the tubes in the horizontal test good(I forgot to check the focus rect. though) with the regulator peging my tester.
Sorry about the box.:eek: You think with all the cramped anti-Q shops i've been in since I was a little kid(I've done worse than that in my early days) that I'd learn to watch where I step!:stupid:

The sparks were like on the out side of the HV cage door and only happened twice in rapid succession.

If he gets the RCA he will be saveing me from my self, but fathers day circumstances may have me there on a different day. I'll give ya a day of twos notice once my scheduel is set.

The vert is working, but I'll probably get that spare tube while I'm there(just to be safe).

Bgadow, I think I'll take you up on your offer, there is a local college that also has it, but I have to photocopy it, and that is not my favorite way to get the sam's.

Tom C.

Hmm, sounds like a wire lead might be touching something it's not supposed to. That, or a failed component of some sort. It's also possible it's nothing at all, of course. First time I started the CTC-7 and the 21-CT-55, I heard a few loud snaps but it never happened again. I think sometimes there are paths to ground over dust or other crap that gets blasted away when HV comes up. Best thing you can do is watch for it happening, and trace it to it's source.

...

The HV rect. tested good, but perhaps it folds under real world opperating conditions. I believe that I have many new and used spares for that tube so I'll try to find a real strong one later on today, and see if a new one helps.

Thanks for the wise sugetions.

Tom C.

I retested the HV rect. and it was just slightly above the min acceptable value on my tester so I replaced it one that pegs the needle on my tester, and the brightness seems to have improved also with the brightness at max the HV only drops from 24 to 19KV. So things are getting better.
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0815.jpg
The lytics are definitly getting warm I'll have to change them as soon as I can.

The blue gun is testing in the bad range, and is nowhere near the other two guns.
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0818.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0819.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...y/DSCN0820.jpg

Tom C.

Here's a copy of an ad for your Admiral.

Very cool! Could you please send me a high resolution scan so I can print it out and frame it above the set once I've got it working?

Tom C.

Sorry I copied it from the internet. I don't actually "have" a copy. You can get them on sh-ebay.

That blue gun may come back up into normal after cooking for a while, I've had several tubes like that. Seems that after being 'woken up' they tend to stay that way, unless the cathode is completely shot. I even had a CYP tube with a blue gun that tested completely dead at 6.3v on the heaters, but then shot right up to good and stayed there with only a volt more. Solution? brightener! lol

That is exactly what I've been doing since I tested the tube. It has been sitting at about 7.3 V on the tester since I tested it, and last time I checked the blue gun was reading in the middle of the white zone between "bad" and "good" scales on my tester so there is hope that it will "wake up" and track somewhere around the other three guns.

Unfortunatly the local college that I get my sam's folders from does not have the folder for my set, so hopefuly Bgadow got my PM and will come through on the Sam's for me.

Tom C.

Well it sorta woke up. when I tested it a couple of hours ago all three guns were testing bad. I immediatly resetup the tester and the blue tested about where the others were, but the other two still tested bad. the only way I can get a dim raster with the sun shining on it as it is now is to turn the brightness all the way up, the only screen control allthe way down, and the drives all the way up.

The drive controls are where the sparking is coming from.

The HV no longer drops so the tube emmisions are probably low(that or the HV fixed it self and my tester is bad).

gota go.
Tom C.

I today left the remote in the care of the local batteries+ franchise so hopefully within the next week they will have either tracked down or made a electricaly and mechanically equivalent replacement for the out of production original.

Tom C.

Shouldn't the screen controls be up as well? If you reduce the screens, the guns will emit less electrons and of course it will be dim. Are drives the same as background?



Bad pots?

Some '60s Zenith color TV remotes (Space Command 600 or 600x; I'm not sure) were set up so that the volume up/down buttons did double duty as the tint and color controls. The latter functions became active when the mute button was pressed; Zenith reminded the user of this with the line at the top of the remote button panel: "Adjust color and tint after pressing mute." I'm not sure whether the channel up/down buttons were used for alternate functions.

Zenith's first wireless electronic remote control TVs used the SC-100 one-button remote. The single button simply changed channels in one direction and could turn the set off when the tuner reached an unused channel. This system likely unnerved some viewers if they overshot the channel they wanted to watch; this meant having to hold the button down while the set's tuner clunked through 13 channels (counting the UHF position, if this series had one). The advent several years later of random-access tuning, using 10 buttons on the set and/or on the remote, now standard on all TVs, solved this problem, as now the viewer could select the desired channel, and go instantly from one local station to the next, without having to see five to twelve channels (depending on how many local channels the viewer's area had) of nothing but snow in between.

That is exactly how I remember the hospital TV worked that I used in 1968, but it was a wired remote control. Like many cable-TV systems, the hospital had some UHF stations translated into the unused local VHF channels, and the UHF position on the TV was "power off". Yep, if I passed the channel I wanted, I had to go all the way around again, including turning the TV off and back on in the process.

In the late 70's, the Olson Electronics store in Chicago had a surplus add-on motor for TV tuners for sale for maybe $5, and it included a power switch in its presumed-UHF position as well.

Well the sam's arrived from banderson today (thanks!), and it definitly uses a wierd CRT set up procedure(compared to the Zeniths and RCA clones I'm used to) the cathode levels are set by pluging the wires that come from the socket into several terminals rather than by potentiometers. The RGB background controls(miniman had the name right first) adjust the grid bias, and a single "master screen" controls the the three screens the leads of which are conected together just after leaveing the socket.

When I get the chance I'll attempt the grayscale procedure, and see if I can get a good picture.

Tom C.