Found a 1969 (?) Zenith today!

[Carmine]

I would have added this to the Estate sale finds, but since I'm looking for a little service help I didn't want to derail that thread.

I'll give details like Doug does...

The house was in St. Clair Shores, an older Detroit suburb (also the city where I live). It's bittersweet to find one of these time-capsule houses, because while I enjoy all the "stuff", I hate that the WWII generation is dying off leaving only old hippies in their place. Here is the house:



Check out this Philco stove...!



Now the set in its "environment". The set on top was 80s era Capehart (some kind of Japanese/Korean re-badge) Thankfully there was a towel underneath it. The Gen-X slacker help was watching the set. The Zenith was STILL plugged in and attached to an outdoor antenna, nobody even tried to turn it on. I asked if they had the remote, and they said somebody already bought that and left the TV. How nice... The 20-something kids couldn't believe it HAD a remote.



Now some pics of the set...













Not the greatest pic of the chassis, sorry. I remember the chassis number starts with a "12", or maybe a "15", which I believe designates the number of tubes on a tube-era Zenith. Some sections of the set have stand-alone transistors which are obviously directly replacing tubes from an earlier version of the chassis.

Now for the problem...

I removed the back and fired her up, listening for the correct "sounds". I hear a little static from the speaker (haven't made much effort to tune for audio yet) and the traditional Zenith "motorboat" sound which I associate with a raster. Also hear the HV, but doesn't quite sound normal, but the flyback looks perfect. CRT heaters light with no drama.

However, no raster.

After about 45 seconds of warm-up, or at least long enough for a picture to appear even on a long-sleeping set, I start to hear some HV "crackling" noises that sound like they are outside the HV cage. At this, I have been shutting the set down. I ran it with the HV cage open, and although I know the 3DC3 HV rectifier doesn't give much light, I could see none, so I swapped with another in my box of used tubes, with no change. Also noted the the Horiz. Output tube appears normal.

One abnormal thing I noticed is the presence of some kind of "goo" that appears at the top of the 2nd Anode and runs down to the yoke. It's like a sticky grease. I do not believe the set came from a smoker-house, as everything else just has normal grey dust. You can see it in this picture...



Nothing around the 2nd anode seems to have "decomposed", so I have no idea what this sticky goo is. The tube is a Zenith, but I don't know the date code yet.

Feel free to begin diagnosis...