Entry level 19" Zenith color TV from 1984
 

Here's a set that someone gave me, years ago, and it worked; but, I was not impressed with the picture. The color demodulation seemed off and I solved that problem by jumping two pins on connector 2B7. At that point, the set had a good picture and i put it into storage.

Fast forward a few years, and the set I was using at the time (a 19" Thomson-era GE with a CTC136 chassis) popped it's flyback. At which time, I pulled out the Zenith and it now had a solid green raster with retrace lines, due to a leaky video output transistor. After replacing that part, the set was ready for service.

After a few months, the set developed an intermittent problem where the sync would go crazy and the picture would become severely overloaded (AGC issue). I fixed it by re-soldering everything in the AGC/IF area, and removing the IF/AGC IC from it's socket and soldering it to the chassis. Years ago, I learned my lesson with intermittent IC sockets, when I had a Curtis-Mathes drive me up the wall and it was a bad IC socket.

The set has been working for months now and so far, no problems.

This set uses a 9-181 signal module, a 9-186 horizontal sweep/HV module, and a small kick-start board.

The cart is one that I bought at a church rummage sale and I think it's like the cart that one could buy to go with these sets.

Nice, and a nice sturdy cart.

Ah yes the "Custom" series sets. The first time I saw one it looked
cheap for a Zenith. I was not happy with the pix at all also. Went to the service manuals & found out why. We started modifying every new set that came in.
I proudly told Roger Eaton the Zenith service rep for most of New England.
He told me never tell Chicago & I know nothing ! With the mod they looked very
good & held up very well.
Jungle IC sockets were trouble on Sanyo / Sears, NEC, & Fisher.
Often got cold joints without a socket also.
Better sets used a 9-214 board that worked fine. Had a comb filter & AKB.
Known as "Advanced System 3" They threw a fantastic pix.
Enuf fer now

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

Wait, what?? Are we talking about the weird yellow/orange/brownish face tones and general pastel colors they had?

What did you come up with??

John

Easy. The bad looking ones all didnt have a auto color switch. With
auto on the colors suck. When the switch in off it grounds one of the IC pins.
So you just run a ground from the secondary control plug blank pin
over to the IF shield. IIRC Hitachi made that IC & I remember they
had an orangy pix at that time but not so bad.