Rants of a 1970's Era Repairman
 

This is written in a humorous tone, but was curious to see if anyone out there during that time frame that was in repairs, had the same issues, and wondering if you have any of those sets today if you have the same problems. I still collect and have a basement full of old sets, so I am not making fun of anyone who has a certain type or fondness for a set I'm ranting about. This was just how it was thru my eyes in the 70's, having to go out on repair calls and keep these daily watchers going. Also, share your experiances!

RCA-- for the most part, not bad, but come summertime, it was back to back flyback replacement, with the CTC-38/39 being the most god-awful set they ever put out.

Zenith --- Not bad, and for the most part trouble-free, but when they did develop an issue, it seemed to be something weird and time consuming.

Motorola --- UGH! For the few that were around then, the most horrid picture on a TV I ever saw. Fleshtones were NEVER right.

Motorola/Quasar --- If you looked at one crosseyed there would be a bad module, or some damn intermittant problem. The modules were expensive then, and getting hard to come by the early 80's

GE--- Another horrid one that was slightly better than a Motorola tube set, but not by much.

Any "house" brand ---- Bradford,Coronado,Trutone,JC Penney... Hard to get parts for. At that time, if it was a "specific" part that was not generic, you had to go thru them to get the part, and man.. they charged a ton.

Thoughts? Opinions?

I started in '80, so I saw a LOT of CTC-38s, and plenty of roundies of all brands still in good service... My most hated set back then: Magnavox. Always a bad flyback, and horribly difficult to pull the chassis on the combo units without skinning fingers trying to dismount the tuner. I was doing all field service at first, so I didn't have any troubleshooting problems to deal with. If it was more that bad tubes or quick bad solder connections, I was to pull the chassis and haul it in. The boss wanted housecalls limited to 30 minutes if possible.

The CTC-16 & 38 was probably the bread & butter set, as there were so many of them and usually the same problems. Chassis pull was <5 minutes, and super-easy to carry with the tuner service-mounted.

Charles

Charles, I agree...
I forgot to include Magnavox, as we didn't have many on the route, but man.. the ones we did..dogs! Of course what kept those in service (along with a few others) was that the lady of the house, usually had the house decorated in a certain style, and if that TV matched, they would pump more money into that set than it was worth. Magnavox had the nicest cabinets, but in my opinion, not good sets at all.

We had a Magnavox 1972 Model. It was not a bad set though it required a new Crt in about 5 years and a tube here and there. Luckily my dads best friend was a TV repairman. It blew a themistor in 1984. We went out and bought an new RCA 25" colortrack set fron Phil & Jims(Cerritos, CA). That lasted until 2004 when my parents moved to Arizona. They gave it away still working great. Right about the Magnavox cabinets, All real wood. The new RCA was all crappy press-board with fake wood veneer. Got it wet even for a moment, it would bubble up.

I repaired TVs for a brief time in the 70s, and I also found RCA to be not bad, but the flys did seem to attract more than their share of humidity. I like working on them. Ditto on the Zeniths. Then there's the accursed Motorola's. Can't stand them. Sylvania was another brand that seemed rather easy to diagnose and repair, and we had a nearby Sylvania parts jobber that stocked just about any part you could want, and if they didn't have it in stock, it could be obtained quickly. My father in law had a D-11 for about 24 years, and I repaired it twice: The famous 5, and a UHF tuner. When it finally crapped out, we junked it, as the boards were just about cooked.
Love the RCA's from the 50's. Easy to work on, and the reward is usually a decent picture.

This is about what Im seeing with my massive collection of tube color sets. The RCA flys dont seem to be as bad as mentioned, maybe because its not that hot and humid here. The Zeniths are tough to fix, I have some I still cant get the HV regulation and color working right on.
I worked in a tv repair shop in the late 80s and it was mostly early solid state stuff. We changed a bunch of those T03 horizontal output transistors. (I cant remember the NTE number but there were around $13) Then we would bring it up on the variac while watching the E current. If it was cool we let it run for a few hours then shipped it. It was a bad day when the thing reshorted an hour later. We also changed lots of tripplers.
The Zeniths were always put at the back of the line because they were almost never a quick fix.
We also repaired VCRs, what a waste of my life that was! Changing belts and rollers, cleaning heads and replacing that LED that sticks up inside the tape.

It was a garage operation but the guy always had 5 sets a day to work on. $25 to check it out and it was usually under $50 out the door repaired.

I have never even seen a ctc38, they must have all died before my time. I currently have a 16, 17, 25 and 35. Those seem to be the most common survives.

...

Yeah, the CTC-22 in particular was a real turkey.:yuck: It'd pop that SS damper diode at the drop of a hat. oc

Any seasoned tech that touched those RCA's kept their stock of 120K, 180K and 220K resistors at the ready, along with the 5GH8's and 13GF7's.

As for RCA flybacks, yes, the humidity was an issue, and the same for the early RCA rectangular yokes - we changed quite a few with corroded windings. We'd give them a blast of Humiseal when we did CRT jobs - no sense in seeing the set again in the summer...

We never seemed to have much trouble getting parts, thanks to four distributors - one RCA, one GE, and two with the other lines. The exception was Magnavox. The big Magnavox "monopolistic" retailer here had the parts locked up as well, so we often replaced knobs at costs approaching 20 bucks a knob....in the 70s. Our knob box became a real asset at times. We also saw a lot of Asian sets, more so than a lot of other shops, as we were in an area with 12 military bases within a 25 mile radius. Lots of odd stuff, kept us busy for sure.

The early Solid state sets with the 2SC1172Bs and the 2SC1308Ks were our bread and butter in the late 70s, along with the Sylvania and Philco sets with regulator problems, most of which were caused by frequent summer lightning storms. We serviced tube sets well into the 90s.

Here's some trivia: MCM Electronics was started by three guys, and they used their initials as the company name. I remember their early catalogs - two pages! NTE started out as New Tone Electronics, with similar offerings back then. Any one remember Fuji-Svea? We used to get the "big iron" transistors from them - NEC, Hitachi, and Toshiba audio outputs - all at crazy low prices. Real stuff - no counterfeits back then. Even their SG613's were the real deal, not seconds. Sourcing parts was fun!

Cheers,

My grandmother had a CTC39xx (it said that on the Sams). New around 1975. And a service contract for it. Saw some of the paperwork, once a pilot light for the channel numbers was replaced. She watched TV a lot, whenever we came to pay a visit grandma had to watch some soap opera around 1PM for a half hour. Was in college then, and back at college I mentioned to some of the girls of the floor of the dorm my grandma watched the same soap they were talking about. "Oh, the episode when the guy was in the hospital? I missed that one, do you remember what happened?" course not, I didn't know the background of the plot and so on.

Grandma checked out years later, and we ended up with it. It still worked, UHF worked but VHF was dead (obviously the VHF local oscillator tube must have been weak), but my brother tossed it.

Sounds like you guys had fun. Unfortunately for me, I didnt get started until recently, so I have my own new sets of issues today. like CHINA, but thats another story.........

Somewhere I have a copy of a letter, written in obvious frustration, to Western Auto. The tech was trying to find a part for what, at the time, was a fairly late model Truetone color console, probably a W-G.

In a pile of tubes I bought were a bunch of Truetone branded tubes and they were all some pretty weird series string types.

I missed the real "fun". I just recall the monthly visits, all through the 70s, from the TV repairman who patched together our General Electric KE chassis color console. I didn't have to pay the bill, of course, so I always loved it! Sometimes I got to sneak around back and see inside...

ctcn38 's were my favorite set. 3rd if transistors, inverter transistors for the agc, tuners, a few flybacks, plus 6GH8 tubes and they were repaired.

Zenith high voltage regulation problems were always solved by changing the VDR in the regulation circuit. part # 63-9068
I made a group of $$$ while in the business and I was not overcharging.

The best sets were Zenith and RCA.

I missed the fun too but I remember the tv man's regular visits to my dad's CTC25 and yes I remember it getting it's flyback getting replaced at least once. My mom had the troublesome solid state Sears/ warwick console that needed the yearly visit by the Sears repairman. It had a problem that was never cured where the sound would go at the best part of the show and you had to hit it on the side to get it back.

My grandmother had a solid state GT Matic Sylvania and it never broke down until lightning got it in 1984. And my uncle's hybrid 1869 Zenith combo was equally trouble free.My grandmother on my dad's side used b/w tvs until her death and hardly ever had tv troubles.

I would have to agree
 

For the most part everything he says is true. Although the Ge sets were pretty staight foward repairs unti they started using double sided boards on some models.

There is a reason why Motorola got out of television and I agree with their decision. The best part of any Motorola was the cabinet.

Rca was always a leader and the flyback was always their weak point.

Other sets in the same category as Motorola were Packard Bell, Some of the Sears models. Oh and don't forget Admiral's they were basically in the same class as Motorola, never remember seeing good pictures on them after they stopped using the Rca chassis put in their cabinets.