1950 RCA 6t65 Highland console
 

Well another freeby followed me home. Looks to be in pretty good cosmetic condition, no major scratches and looks 100% complete. Cant wait to pull the back panel and check out the chassis.

From what ive read, this is the 6t65 "Highland" console with the kcs47a chassis, 16" tube. Hopefully it will be an easy restoration, since I want to have this baby in my house by winter.

http://i60.tinypic.com/30d87wg.jpg

Nice looking console in great condition. That'll be a great player when restored.

Hi, I have that set too. It was my great grandmas first set. If I remember right, that is a metal coned tube, so be careful because the whole cone is the second anode!

Very nice looking set, good luck with it.

Gregb

Those sets......are usually never an easy restoration. At least not the few I've worked on. That one's usually a challenge. Hopefully the power transformer is original, there were a lot of cheapo power transformers installed in KCS47 chassis sets back in the day.

I had this EXACT set for my first vintage TV. Since I did not know anything about them at that point, Kamakiri gave it a shot for me. Turns out mine was completely fried, and these chassis were not the best quality produced by RCA in the 1950s. Hope yours is in good shape and restorable. Tim used what he could from mine in parts and the rest unfortunately found the junkyard.

Thanks for the tips everyone.

Well EVEN IF everything is shot, its a nice cabinet and could receive the internals from a more modern color crt tv. Then see what pieces of the chassis can be used by other restorers.

I will be crossing my fingers that she is restorable :)

Do you have a CRT tester? IMHO, metal tubes are more likely to leak and die than all glass tubes. A 16GP4 may be pretty tough to find. If the tube is good or a replacement can be found, go for it ... you will likely increase your troubleshooting skills as well as your vocabulary of cuss words. :) Very pretty set, worth the effort.

jr

I have a similar set , in a slightly plainer mahogany cabinet. Got it free at a garage sale years ago. Tube is good in mine. Gets a raster, but thats as far as my efforts have gotten. Has sync, contrast, and sound issues. i think mine has a 16AP4 in it.

What did you say? Modern color TV? :no: :thumbsdn: :nono:

Well this has the 16gp4 crt in it. I have access to a crt tester, but its missing some of the plug adapters, so I will have to find out if i can test this.

When I opened the back, the missing power cord was wrapped around the crt. As well as a strange alligator clip that was clipped to the copper piece that goes between the HV cage and tube. Clipped to the chassis. Perhaps this set died, someone attempted a repair and gave up.

http://i60.tinypic.com/6tppbr.jpg

and yeah, if the tube and chassis ARE dead, why not give away the pieces to restorers who can use it to get their sets back up and running? Better to modernize the internals, than to let a beautiful empty case go to waste and sit, maybe forever.

Worse than that, I was about to recommend a 24" HDTV... decent fit since the mask for the nearly flat 16GP4 should fit pretty well up against the flat screen, height should be about right (11.5 inches) and only about 2 inches of width will be lost on either side when the set is in 16:9 mode. Much better, of course if the HDTV is in 4:3 mode (about 15.3inch width).

jr

A CRT VGA computer monitor would work. You'd drive the monitor with a HDMI to VGA converter box (many on ebay and such) from a cable box or such.

Allright, I pulled the chassis and wasnt too happy with what I found underneath. Multiple capacitors and resistors twisted in parallel, a few hanging wires and an octal socket thats connected to nothing on either side.

Ill check the transformers tomorrow, see whats going on. Hopefully ill be able to test the crt this weekend.

http://i58.tinypic.com/28cmyi8.jpg

Parallel Capacitors are common, if repairs were done by somebody with a poor stock of caps... they should be replaced with the proper value.

Parallel resistors in the power supply section are likely factory, and are shown in schematics for the set. (for example two 12K and one 15K 2 watt resistors in parallel in the 115V supply). These combos are mostly located close to the filter choke.

jr

Do you know where i can download the schematics for this?

ETF has the Sams (113-7):

http://earlytelevision.org/tv_schema...grams_rca.html

jr

This set's had a lot of repairs done to it, or some past repairman just replaced a bunch of caps trying to fix a problem. All those colorful plastic caps are from a later period though probably still sometime in the 50's.

I have no idea about the octal plug, perhaps it was used to run a Norelco Protelgram projection unit at some time?

Your last sentence is what you find a lot of. A lot of sets came out of defunct TV repair shop's hoards. That was where I got a lot of my stuff in the 80s as a high school kid taking first year electronics. A lot of our classroom's hoard of donation sets were 50s and 60s. The bulk was that and the rest 70s. That's just what was being replaced, repaired or just upgraded at that time. And I use the term hoard as electronics and the people who work with it tend to form crazy amounts of things buried in piles doing absolutely no good. I am guilty of it myself. I am crazy enough to do my electronics work and hoard in the house. I have my mini bench in a redheads kitchen! Yeah! I am lucky to be alive!:banana: Luckily we both collect different things, so maybe she cuts me some slack on the kitchen deal.

Anyway, that alligator clip you mention sounds like it was clipped to the rigid wire that presses against the side of the CRT to discharge the high voltage from the CRT during service. That bare wire is actually part of the HV circuit as much as any other wire. There is conductive paint on the CRT called agadag (spelling?) and the sprung wire must touch the CRT surface to complete the circuit. Always make sure that is touching the rougher aquadag surface and not just glass where a hole has formed.

I have similar RCAs, but a bit older. Mine are 8T-243 and TC-127. Only the 127 I have gotten back to playable. I replaced all the electrolytic and paper/foil capacitors and a few resistors. I have vertical shrinking at the top, but the set is very stable with a really sharp picture. That vintage RCA was known for really good picture quality from all I have read or seen.

My experiences with the two I have compels me to say that you MUST replace the power supply electroytic capacitors before bothering with anything else besides checking that CRT. My 243 was frying 5U4 rectifiers in a New York minute. I had to buy a replacement power transformer for the 127 and my belief is that someone at some point was determined to get life out of the set and simply fried the tranny by leaving it on for a while. You don't want to replace that power transformer! On top of that; your power supply is the heart and soul of the set. You want and need stability there so you can safely see what else is going on.

Slow starting never hurts, and if done right can allow you to reform many capacitors after you stabilize your power supply. Even if you have already applied full AC wall current to the set for a bit, you can go back and let the set 'simmer' at say 50v for a few hours and work your way up in maybe 15v increments. Even after DC or B+ kicks in and you end up finally seeing what the set will or wont do, you will find that the longer you let it work the better it performs. The old caps can take a long time to do what they need to do. Just carefully feel the caps and make sure nothing is getting hot. If it gets hot; replace it.

And does the octal plug have anything to do with sound? I can't remember how my speaker plugged in. I would say a normal speaker plug...

In this case however, the CRT is a 16GP4, which is a METAL CONE CRT. The *whole* cone is connected to the HV, and a "doorknob" capacitor (mounted on the front of the HV cage) is used for filtering. I suspect that the clip-lead was left there for convenient grounding of the metal cone while servicing the set.

jr

Oops! That's exactly what my Sylvania tube data book says. I had a DuMont once with a 19AP4 metal/glass CRT. Neat engineering concept bonding metal and glass like that, but the shock hazard is incredibly high. Mine had a rubber boot around the bell of the tube and a big warning label. The boot of course lent some comfort and protection, but I just made it a point to stay away from that tube; especially powered up!

Im at a bit of an impasse, we dont have the adapter to test this crt. Most of the adapter plugs arent there... I tested the tubes, only a few are low and the 5u4 is dead.

as for the oddball octal socket under the chassis that connects to nothing, i havent a clue. This set has two octal sockets on the top of the chassis, one plugs into the HV cage, the other to the speaker. The one under the chassis, i dont know where or what it was supposed to be.

http://i61.tinypic.com/b6tycw.jpg