the next big problem for collectors of bpc sets.brittle plastics.
 

while tossing a bunch of late 70's-90's sets today i found quite a few that the plastics had gone brittle.
as in falling apart!aoc,sony,and sanyo being the worse.the spectricon(rebadged aoc)literally fell apart when i picked it up by the side handgrips.the broken plastic stinks too.looks like these may turn to dust like catalins by the time they are collectable.
many played but could not even give them away without waiting months for pickup.
good news is nearly no effort to bust em up in the cans.

I've seen that issue with the plastic going bad on Sonys and Sanyos, and also Emersons (even fairly new). It's VERY dangerous; not only to the TV from falling in on itself, but I have received some NASTY slash wounds from fall-apart TV cabinets. On the Sonys, you have to watch for the gray plastic turning brownish. Particularly the KV-25XBR, and the 27" late 80s sets with the bone colored cabinet and gray backs.

Charles

I know that polystyrene will become brittle with excessive heat but I thought all modern plastic cabinets were made of ABS plastic. I have not noticed this on radios from this same era, even the Sonys. I hope this does not mean the CCRadio 2 I just bought will disintegrate in fiteen to twenty years.

Lovely. I have loads of BPC Sony's and now a Sanyo. Somebody up there hates me...

I remember first hearing about this happening to s0nys at the ETF meet, I can't remember who told me though....

Sounds like a good reason to not collect worthless sets.

It is age that makes junk into collectables.
For instance if fosilized dinosaur turds wern't bagilions of years old no one would want them.
Some sad day BPC sets will be collectable, but that time is still far off.
Not too long ago monochrome sets that are not being sought out by collectors were considered junk (I have an 80's electronics magizine that had a project which called for a 10KV cap and instructed you to make one or pull one out of an old junk TV).

Worthless?

I've run into the brittle plastic problem with a lot of the 90's Panasonic sets. We have removed several of them from customers homes for an update or because the set failed and have had them just about fall apart in our hands. Some of them barely made it out of the house and into the van.

Back around '89, when I first started collecting tube radios, most collectors thought anything later than 1940 was junk and they certainly didn't pay attention to the AA5 radios of the '50's and '60's. Now, the younger generation is into the later tube radios and some people even collect the solid state radios of the '70's+. Back then, TV collecting was unheard of and those who did were not interested in sets newer than the 1940's. TV collecting has a long way to go in order to catch up to old radios; but, there are people who seek out the newer sets from the '70's and '80's. One day, I can see collectors getting into the BPC and SPC sets of the '90's and 2000's. Heck, up until a few years ago, I focused my collecting mainly on old radios. Any TV's that I brought home were for the purpose of fixing them for resell. During the '90's, I can't tell you how many tube TV's from the '50's-'70's came thru here. What I could fix easily was sold and the rest were junked. Now, I wish I had some of those sets.

Not entirely, you can always pull the copper from the yokes and sell it to the scrapyard. :D

Or get one off the curb as a decent set when your not able to afford a newer set.

worse than worthless.soon we will have to pay to be rid of them.the copper junkers just make a mess getting yokes.so i pull them myself when i bust the set up into the can.thought of setting 20 or so of the ones that play somewhat onto the burn pile and plug them up.record and post to youtube.that pile is huge right now.iirc secret life of machines did that with a big pile of junker sets.

What is it about the plastic that makes it degrade? Is it the chemical composition? I am very curious to know what exactly is happening. I have 30 to 40 year old plastic cabinet TVs and there is no sign of plastic breakdown. Could it be the bpc sets were built with lower quality material?

Answer, yes. Remember cars built in the 80's (mostly) where you would see plastic trim parts degrade and discolor? The more non virgin plastic (reground) that is used in the mix, the more unstable the life of the plastic will be.

Re-used plastic originates from the runners used in the molds and those pieces are seperated and sent back into the grinder machine and then mixed with new pellets to be liquified and extruded (injected) into the mold. Cabinet pieces, bad runs, etc. all go back into the mix. Some perchantage of regrind is acceptable but there are limits.

As with anything, plastics will age and outgas just like most everything else, some do better than others.

I think in a lot of cases, it was a combination of both using cheaper plastics-More regrind, less virgin, & the fact some of the "Good Stuff" had been outlawed by the EPA. We ran into that in the printing industry- Tolulene was used by the tankcar loads for ages-it was a GREAT solvent, dried quickly, etc. It was also HIGHLY flammable-They used to put it in gasoline as an octane booster-and VERY carcinogenic, so they said. It also gave cigarettes a distinctive flavor-one that the tobacco companies worked HARD to recapture for years after it was outlawed.

Imagine a modern car 50 years from now.....:banana:

A lot of cars built after 1985 or so might be "grounded" because of all the computer controlled gizmos & stuff. Also, I have a friend who worked for Bendix, they do a LOT of subcontracting for car cos, he said that after demand for a certain item drops below X units, they not only stop producing it, the tooling is re-cycled/shit-canned...So, in 2055, yr mamaw's 35K mile 1998 Caddy creampuff that you've loved all these years, might NOT be able to run-at least not w/all the little doohickeys still working...

Yea Sandy, I also like to think of that as "planned obsolence".

The tin whisker problem and flash memory life cycle issues will ensure those cars dont run.
Not saying it cant be done, look at the old rca stuff. The boards get crispy on heavy use sets but they survive.
Can you imagine all the toxic gasses all this petroleum based crap releases as it decomposes..? No wonder cancer had gone up 3 fold in the past 10 years. Everyones house is a toxic fishtank because of cheap disposable junk.

I remember cars, electronics and nearly everything else went through a serious quality slump during the 80s. That is when the disposable mentality really started taking hold.

Ayup...You know that horrible "smoke" that gets on the inside of yr car windows ? That's stuff bein' released by all the plastics, vinyls, adhesives, etc as they age/deteriorate...

I'm starting to see problems with the plastics on Philips plasma tv's in where the mounts that hold the pdp panels into the plastic casing. The end result is the panel falling into the casing of the tv severing the lower buffer ribbon cables on the screen and junking the panel because these ribbons are fused into the glass. The plastics get brittle from the excessive heat they put out and causes the screw mounts to break. The plastics get yellowed. I've seen the Vizios starting to do this areound where the back screws to the casing too. Yep even the plasmas are starting to become brittle.

All the gizmos still work on my 20 year old Benz... we'll see where we sit in another 20 years :scratch2: I did have to replace an electrolytic cap in the dome lamp timer.

-J

I forgot about those... The 19" late 80s-early 90s Panasonics and Quasars did that BIGTIME with the backs. I have a scar on my leg where the whole cabinet basically fell to powder, and jammed a sharp piece of powdery black plastic into my shin. I should have known, because the black plastic had turned brown in places, and stank.

WARNING: This problem includes the rare and collectible 1.5" Panasonic CT-101 color set. I have one that was in mint condition, until I went to slide the battery case open. The whole side of the cabinet crumbled away, and put off a horrible stench. I have another one, which WILL do that if I dare touch it. Now it's in the box safely, but I can't enjoy having it if I want it to stay in 1 piece, and eventually it'll probably fall apart inside the box :(

Back to Sonys, I have a KX-2501, which has a wood cabinet with plastic back. I went to push it farther back onto a shelf from it's side (one hand on the side of the cabinet, and one hand on the side of the back), and my hand went right through the plastic with barely any force. Now you can blow on it and pieces fall off.

Charles

Yeah, I have 2 of those CT-101s..You'd think, since they were sorta Panasonic's "Showcase" product, they'd spent more than 2 cents on the cases...One of mine, the case is toast, the other one is OK, but its NEVER fit together very well. Just very "Cheap & Shoddy"...And one of 'em I bought new in '84, IIRC, the sucka was $350...For that kinda money, it should have had a better case. Metal ? (grin)

Perhaps someone will make repro cases for those little panasonics not too far down the road.

The plastic decomposition issue has to have something to do with the environment. I have a PC-101 (Canadian version of CT-101) and the case is still 100%: neither cracking nor brittle.

There is a solution to yellowing plastics: http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/

interestingly the plastic used in virtually all European sets (including UK built sonys, Panasonics, Toshibas...) seems to last forever.

The only case of rotting plastic i saw in my life was a vintage 60s Italian made electric clothes brush, it belonged to my grandma and was still perfect in the mid 90s, she kept it in a drawer in her bedroom, about 2 years ago she gave it to me to fix as it didn't work anymore...

I was horrified to see the whole plastic shell deformed, crackled and covered in a salt-like crystalline stuff, it smelled weird, somewhat like fresh fiberglass... no wonder it quit working, the motor inside was incredibly rusty and copper parts had incredible verdigris growth on them and was seized solid...

Since it was unsalvageable, i decided to have some fun, i plugged it to burn out the motor... as soon as it got hot the rotten plastic caught fire and flash-burned, oddly part of it melted, part of it just charred leaving a crispy black "ghost" of the original plastic shell.

the vizio is just as bad.