1973 Motorola Quasar II estate sale find!
 

This weekend at the estates I picked up a nice 1973 Motorola Quasar II console set. The Quasar II is the tube/hybrid chassis and was priced a little cheaper than the regular "Quasar" which was all solid state. This is the TS-934 chassis and it was built in the 271st day (Sept. 28th) of 1973 at the Motorola TV complex in Franklin Park, IL.

This one comes in an attractive higher end Mediterranean cabinet with the red cloth speaker grille.

This was another unique situation in which the TV was just never used and remained unplugged. At the sale, I tried this one out expecting some sort of defect, however, it worked with a bright picture on channels 6 and 48. Due to the layout of the house it was in, I am led to believe that it was always in the basement which was nice and dry.
Typically, the ERO caps in these sets are always leaky or shorted causing a plethora of issues, but somehow the ones in this set have survived the test of time.

The original owners were WWII generation Italian Americans. They took very good care of their home and furnishings, which I typically see this with the Italian, German and Czech owned homes here in my area.

Here are some more photos for your enjoyment.

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Additional photos:

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That is really neat looking ! ! !

Works in a drawer....

neato looking convergence instructions on there......

I wonder if customers ever messed with them.....

looks way too clean in there........

Doug must have a time machine too.........

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As in New England. The best kept stuff was always in the Italians houses,
even when dirt poor they took perfect care of there sets & homes.

Seems to be your week for super clean rarities. I did a ton of
the hybrid Mot / Quasars 14-19 but dont remember the console chassis.
Nice find !

73 Zeno:smoke:

Beautiful!

I remember when UL changed their ratings on PC board substrate and the old brown phenolic gave way to the yellow boards you see.

Another thing you may not have thought about - all that inter-module wiring that looks somewhat random is exactly per engineering specs. The assembly line had a prototype chassis inside a transparent plastic box, and if there was any question on wire routing, they were to duplicate the prototype precisely.

Outstanding catch Doug. Looks just like new. Congratulations.

Nice ! Looking forward to the video of it !

Very true on the Italian comment.
Us italians take great care of everything ! :)

wonderful ... amazing what it out there!

I see its "one-button color" feature is called "Insta-matic". It is a good thing that Kodak did not make TV sets; Motorola would have got in big trouble. :)

That is only slightly older than/different electronics wise from the one my folks had in the early 90's (cabinet is completely different though). One day I or someone with less reason to want it will find the exact chassis/model/cabinet that we had, and I'll again have one.

So is this a similar model....?

http://chicago.craigslist.org/wcl/ele/4647150507.html

He posted pictures with the back off, and all the metal on the side with the knobs
is shaped just like the floor model on this page......

This set is in chicago, and just $10.

hello.......

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Hey Doug, BTW, do you have any plans to refill your YouTube new video's well going forward? Seems like it's been a little dry lately. I think most folks enjoy your productions.

Tom(PK)

Nope. If you want to see it, click the 'what I want' link in my sig and then click on the first youtube link...Someone out there has one so they do exist.
That 10$ set is tempting, but I really don't have much room at the moment, and I'd still be looking for 'my' WID set even if I bought it...Maybe in a week if I can reorganize my basement and show the 'war department' that I have room...

it's still the early 70s in that room...

Actually, there was a lawsuit, and Motorola settled by adding the hyphen and agreeing to not register it as a trademark.

"Instamatic" at that time was used by about 8 companies, and Kodak was cubbyholed in the photographic realm.

Cheers,

Doug,

I just noticed the set still has it's dittle stick attached to the convergence panel, and the "flat 8" is still across the IF panel! That set never saw the service shop. Like the GE mini-manuals, some shops regularly kept the dittle stick and the flat 8 - we saw lots of them with one or both missing. Rare to see a Quasar II, much less with accessories.

my dad was a maintenance supervisor in a munitions plant back in the 60s.when he saw the first quasar sets he marvelled at the way they were built.couldnt praise them enough.didnt care for the picture but the electronics!this is a beauty.same fine electronics and by the time this was built,the crts were excellent

When I was a kid, my uncle had a Quasar II TV that with a large cabinet was very similar to that one. After he got a new Zenith TV with the Space Phone (that I got from him later) in 1984, he moved the Quazar downstairs and we used to play video games on it with my cousin's Magnavox Odissey!
The Quazar was probably a bit older, if I remember well, there were horizontal slider picture adjustments below the tuner knobs and the control panel brass-colored rather than woodgrain.

Quasar II
 

What are the ABCD brown buttons for on the front panel ?

Great set!

This set reminds me that as a senior in high school I was invited to participate in an educational program the Motorola was trying to start up. They used the Quasar solid-state chassis as a trainer and had a Heathkit like manual instructing the student on how to assemble it. My lab partner and I were unable to get past the hand wire chassis portion of the assembly process during the two days we had to complete it .

The set had the ability to artificially introduce troubles via switches and defective components.

This was part of a two-day educational conference in Seattle in 1977. It was a great experience and I still have the hand tools that were given to me as payment for my participation.

I think that's the UHF tuner. Motorola made car radios and it may work similar to that, to tune in your favorite UHF stations. Maybe someone will chime in on exactly how they worked, and how they were set. I don't see a manual UHF tuning knob.

I love these sets .Those Motorola Quasar sets always had a beautiful crisp picture and color on them.TO me atlease.

My parents had a 19 inch version from that same era which had superb color on it.I have that set here and I like to fix it up.

The only problem on these sets I had are the plug in boards which get intermittent connections. Before I was into repairing TV's My parent had the set in the shop for the loose boards and the other time for a bad sound chip on the signal IF board.The pix tube looked great when they retired it in the early 1990's and replaced it with a 27 inch Sony.

Precisely. The one UHF tune knob (UHF Fine Tune) is in the trap door at the top. Tune in a UHF station, pull out one of the UHF presets, and push back in, just like a car radio of the era.

Motorola was always looking for new talent for their engineering department. Their recruiters were always at MSOE and Marquette school of engineering on graduation day.
They offered tours of the Franklin Park plant and to discuss job openings. :yes: