CL find Dumont
 

Hey everyone, just wanted to share one of my latest finds. It's a Dumont RA103 C-2. Found it on the local CL for $50. This is my first Dumont, I've been waiting for one to pop up for years. I love the look of this TV. I brought it home, cooked it on the Variac and it worked, I got a picture using a HD converter, not a great picture but I was thrilled.

That's pretty nice! Great price too.

I'd love to have found that myself.

I've got an RA-113 thats under recapping.

That's a great find. I love my RA-103. This article has some notes that may be interesting:

http://antiqueradio.org/DuMontRA-103Television.htm

Since yours already shows signs of life, that should be a straightforward restoration. Just follow the Hippocratic motto: Above all, do no harm :)

Regards,

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

Excellent! I notice you have an extra set of controls on the left as compared to Phil's. Are they for a radio ?

Any pics of the restoration?

Thanks Phil, I'll check it out.

Those are Radio controls, I love the symmetry of the controls on ech side of the picture tube.

I've always heard that the early Dumonts were very high quality tv's. I haven't pulled the chassis to look for any repairs but I was quite impressed how functional the set was after bringing it home. Also I always love to hear the back stories on sets I buy. I always ask. It's cool to find a one owner although To them it was just an old TV they had in the basement. I was told that if no one bought it it was going in the trash.

Score! A great early TV in great condition, for a song.

And it works. I'd say that's the Find of the Year...:smoke:

In 1959, I worked at an Atlanta TV repair shop, with a retired QC inspector who had worked on the assembly line at Dupont. He told the story that one of QC's final tests on a completed chassis was to give the power transformer a gentle tap with a 5 pound rubber mallet and if the picture blinked, they sent the chassis back as a reject. He said on the first day of production on the 1949 test production line, they had 100% rejection. Management shut the line down and moved the workers to another line. A few days later, management reopened the line with one sole change. They eliminated the mallet test.

This story came about because a late 1940's Dumont set came in for repair with horizontal problems that looked sync related. Swapping the suspected tubes did nothing and I could not locate a schematic for it. He walks over, grabs my voltmeter, and correctly diagnosis the problem in under 30 seconds without even looking to see what the tube layout was, or for that matter, what the inverted chassis was. It would have been an understatement to say that I was dumbfounded.