National CL-2620: An early Australian color set

[dr.ido]

I found this one at the junk auction last week. This was one of the sets available in 1975 for the introduction of color. It was assembled in Australia from Japanese and American parts.

As found the power switches are broken (hence the panel out on top of the case with the switches bridged out at the moment) and there was an open diode in the power supply. As usual it needs some caps. It currently has a hum bar and the contrast varies from scene to scene (it really hates ads with flashing text at the moment).



The CRT (National made 25" Delta gun) is in better shape than I expected for a set with instant on (the later Nationals I used to find with instant on almost always had bad CRTs).

I suspect there is probably a related American model out there somewhere. There are cutouts on the chassis for a vacation switch and circuit breaker that aren't fitted on this version. The chassis itself appears to be designed to run directly from 117V mains, though obviously the Australian version is fitted with a step down transformer.

This set will probably end up going to another collector for spares. I don't have the space for it and the cabinet is almost falling apart. I just had to see if would actually run.

[bgadow]

I'm curious what American parts it contains. 1975 was the year that they took over Motorola's TV line; maybe that chassis showed up in some late 70s Quasars as well.

[AndrewM]

I finally got around to powering up my own CL-2620 with a pattern generator as a video source.
To my surprise it powered up with no complaints but with an off frequency horizontal oscillator. I was able to confirm though that all three CRT guns are producing good colour. The set is currently buried so repairs will have to wait.

I obtained this set around 6 months ago from its elderly owners who took good care of it during its life.

[dr.ido]

On closer inspection what I thought was a "made in USA" label is actually a "printed in USA" label. So there are no American parts in this set, but for some reason they decided to stick American made labels on the Japanese switches for use in an Australian set.

Some more pictures:



The CRT is an National 25VCXP22. Most of the parts have Matsushita logos on them and the boards are marked made in Japan. The heatsinks are marked made in Australia though. Perhaps that was necessary to meet some local content requirement.



The control panel is now back in. The tone control looks like an afterthought tacked on to fill the whole where a UHF tuner would normally be fitted. The tuning knob is probably from a another set, it doesn't seem to fit right. A door that would normally cover the contrast/brightness/etc controls is missing.



It does have a form of OSD. When the fine tuning knob is pushed in a yellow bar appears on screen. It expands and contracts as the fine tuning is adjusted.