Last USA-built GE portable?
 

'Evenin. I pulled out my '75 GE 12" b&w just for kicks the other day. You remember, its an SF chassis portable and I posted some backwards pics a while back......well I was curious as to where this was built, and all I found was 'General Electric; Portsmouth, Virginia, USA'

Is it possible that this wasnt built offshore as late as 1975? Seems odd, since most portable b&ws were imported after the early 70s and this was a BOTL set.... Also the crt sticker claims Made in USA..

Can anyone shed some insight?

Back in 1980 I had a job interview at that GE TV plant, as an electrical engineer specializing in video work. At one point during the interview day, they showed me the production floor, there were a chain of hooks hanging from above with TV chassis slowly traveling to the next event in their production. Smaller chassises. Think I saw CRTs too, possibly for Portacolors. I was working at some areospace defense contractor at the time doing mostly lists of what pin of what connector connected to some other pin of another connector, or chasing mil spec part numbers for resistors. Told one interviewer (I talked to the usual 6 or so) about my areospace contractor company using linear deflection circuits to drive the horizontal deflection of the displays we used in our flight simulators. He said WHAT, LINEAR? The idiots :-) at GE didn't hire me... :thumbsdn: heard years later the entire GE plant there died not long after my interview.

The General was an absolute master at building stuff as simply/cheaply as possible. (well, still are I guess) Maybe they had the art of building these so down-pat that it was cheaper to build them at Portsmouth? Still, I would think that would have been the end of the line for bw portables from the US. Maybe when they went 100% solid state they moved offshore? I had a pair of similiar sets, one from about 66 and the other from about 74. Only minor changes. I parted out the newer one because it was too rough. Anyway, the EIA code on the old one showed that GE built the picture tube but in the newer model, despite the GE label, Clinton built the tube. I don't know what that means but I found it interesting! If yours doesn't have code 188 than maybe it's Clinton too?

wa2ise - Sorry to hear about your bad experience there. Just goes to show that maybe if these companies had hired intelligent engineers ...well you get my drift.. Not to say they didnt have some excellent people working there (before they got rid of everyone:thumbsdn: )

bgadow - I'll have a look at that code ASAP , interesting fact there. I guess these sets were indeed cheap to assemble right at home. I will post back later. Happy Memorial day, BTW

This is cool - The EIA on my tube is number 1240 - Guess it was OEMd from Clinton or someone else too. Am I correct in assuming that Clinton was/is an American firm?

When I worked at Quinton, they bought CRT's from Clinton. Their bread-and-butter system in the '85-92 period used a 9" greenochrome. I remember the old triangular Sylvania logo embossed at the end of the CRT index-key/pin-spacer. They made the gun only, as Clinton shipped the finished tube by the dozen in cardboard cartons on wooden pallets. They were obviously what their envelope supplier shipped open-ended jugs from Taiwan in. The cardboard had that pale color common to imports, and on it was printed "TINTED GLASS BLUB" Clinton is currently located in Illinois. Quinton used yokes by Penn Tran for most of their large and narrow-neck CRT-based displays!

Second that! They had a 4-stage development (research, advanced development, product development, cost reduction engineering) before sending anything to production, where other places had only the first 3 or the middle 2 or only the 3rd (usually by licensing RCA designs). That is how they came up with little things like putting all the rear-panel pots on a common substrate. At Motorola, we used to marvel at the cost-cutting stuff we'd find when we did competitive analysis of their chassis. They definitely knew how to play the game of relative cost of initial production vs. warranty work.