Philco 50T1632

[kbmuri]

Part of the "barn beasts" eBay score. I decided to work on it first. First time I've run across a 16LP4 roundie. The tube is mammoth compared to a 10BP4 or even a 12LP4. I'm doing this one because I would like to settle the question of whether or not a rejuvenated tube sucks or not. The other barn beasts have CRTs that test well. This one had completely zero emission. I thought perhaps the neck socket had a bad wire so some of the pins weren't making contact anymore, because I'd never seen a total zero tube emission before. Even the black-screen 12LP4 from the Admiral from hell scored a 1. After leaving the Beltron on for several minutes and rocking the socket a bit I did notice that the emission went from 0 to maybe 0.1. So maybe the pins were connecting. So I tried the cleaning function. It never lit a light. Figured I was looking at a parts set at this point but I tried the restoring function anyway. Just as advertised, it restored correctly, no surprises, and tested afterwards as nearly NOS. I let it sit a week (from last weekend to this weekend) and it still re-tests 10.0 and ten seconds of "life test". Apparently good as new, unless the Beltron is lying to me. I think this CRT was about as "gone" as gone gets, short of going to air. So it's a good test case.

I started restoring the rest of the set today, to see the tube in action. I will try to run it a lot and see how a back-from-the-dead Beltron restoration holds up.

The chassis is full of Bumblebees, and unfortunately there's only a partial Sams for it. So it might take a while. And I'm debating whether or not to de-solder all the cap leads this time (from another post).

If anyone could ID a Rider's document or another service sheet, I'd appreciate it. The Sams (91A-10) is just a preliminary brief, not a full folder, and it's pretty lacking.

Photos later...