[julianburke]

National Video Corporation was nearly bankrupt and Motorola helped bail them out temporarily as Motorola was striving to manufacture a rectangular set to "put them out front" so to speak. They did but the quality output of NVC was far less than adequate from engineering, to having a clean facility to poor labor and management. My second job was with Modan Service here in Knoxville, Tn. and one of the owners was Charles Duncan who was a field representative for Motorola for over 15 years at that time. (1970) He told me the whole story of how Motorola and NVC teamed up but we think the real culprit was a very poor labor pool made up of mostly of unskilled help who basically knew nothing about the trade.

I worked at a picture tube rebuilding plant here in Knoxville after high school for several years and I understand the critical points of tube building esp the cleanliness part of it. Even the simplest parts can be the most critical in the quality of your product.

Building 23EGP22's was a major stepping stone that Motorola undertook when other manufacturers were still doing their homework. The 23EG's rarely lasted over 1-2 years and about 35% of them were replaced within 90 days in warranty right off the bat. About 2 or 3 years later Motorola started selling hardware kits to convert the 23's to a 25AP22 type tube. It took most of a day to do this conversion and we hated to do it as it was a real pain. The kits came out about a year later after the sets were sold for warranty and about a year after that were sold for conversions. Guess who was stuck with the chore of doing them??!! Yup, I became an expert of tube changing. By about 1970 most 23EG sets disappeared. I did love doing Zeniths (We did Zenith and Motorola only) as they were easy and I could do a mechanical change in about 15 minutes, let the set cook out for about 15 minutes and do convergence in about 3-5 minutes if there was no problem with the convergence board. About half of the time there would be a shorted rectifier or a burned pot on that board. I knew where every wire went on a Zenith and could have the whole chassis out in about 60 seconds and I was good! (Knobs first on the front bottom tray, then the four screws on the bottom, then pull the wires off and viol la, that was it-yank it.) For some reason I don't miss those days but we knew of nothing else and that was what you had to do to eat in those days!

Oh yeah, one more thing: 23EG's were never crisp or bright as they almost always looked "soft".