Zenith CC II 19JC55Z Circuit Breaker tripping

[Tugboat]

First off I'd like to say hello to everyone here. This is my first post.

I got this set from my sis-in-law a year ago. She got it back in '77. Over the past year I have been using it with my RCA VDT-350 VHS and RCA SJT-200 CED player. For most of that time the set ran pretty will with the occasional drop in brightness and it could have used a touch up on the convergence. That is, until the other day. Out of the blue while watching The Love Boat, the screen went blank and the circuit breaker blew. I reset the breaker and the channel number lit up for about 5 seconds and the breaker tripped again.

Now I hope you'll hang in with me here as all I currently know about fixing TVs I've learned over the past two days from the unit's service manual and searcing the web.

Upon inspection I noticed that the video ouput board on the neck of the crt was smoking from the center as the breaker tripped. I removed the board and opened the white ring that contains the spart gap and it was pretty black and had a small opening in it from arching. From what I've been able to figure out, that gap has something to do with the HV for focus? I've inspected the tripler and find nothing out of the ordinary, but it's hard to know since the breaker only gives me about 5 seconds before tripping. During that time I hear nothing. I only see and smell smoke from the spark gap.

Any help from this point forward would be greatly appreciated. How can I go about finding the bad component? So far I've come up with either a bad tripler or CRT (both of which I can purchase replacments for from Sears). The CRT is 19VGZP22 and $128. The tripler is 977-43 and $60.99. I don't know if these prices are high, but they are Zenith parts.

If you need any other information to help, please let me know and I'll do my best to get it to you.

Thank you!

Robert