[Chad Hauris]

This is slightly off topic but re: radio shack: yes Radio shack has saved the day on a few occasions. Needed a potentiometer switch for a replacement tone pot on a 30's Philco Radio...R.S. had it. Also blew the 3/4 amp slow blow fuse on a Seeburg juke box when the coin switch jammed and the local RS had it.

If you go to a Radio Shack in a small town particularly out West, you can often find all kinds of things that the big city stores do not carry anymore, from reel to reel tape, computer cassettes and cassette players, logic chips, phono styli and tubes, etc.

But yes, you're right, most things we do have to get from distributors.

I have a CTC-39 which came out of a school where it was still being used in the early 90's. It had shorted power supply diodes, fixed those and got a great picture. We had one in the library at the middle school in the late 80's where they would tape education programs from public TV and this CTC-39 ran all day long. Still remember the "hot transformer insulation" smell it gave off from the flyback.

I have put a 6 volt lamp bulb in series with the cathode of the HO tube...this allows me to tune up the efficiency coil for least current (lowest brightness) plus, the lamp should burn out on an overload. A 1/2 amp fast blow fuse also would be a good idea (some RCA portables used a thermal fuse near the HO tube to open the cathode if the temperature got too high, other portables hooked the cathode up to the power circuit breaker to open the AC line if cathode current got to high...rget should have used these safety precautions on the consoles, too.)