Beautiful Motorola!

[nasadowsk]

Well, it's here....

The set, cosmetically, exudes coolness. Beyond the knobs (which, I'm in need of an assist on - the on/off/volume's warped, the channel's numbers are gone, and the contrast thingie is broken...), the safety glass is a conformal type like on later color sets. There's a mask behind it, giving it a kind of 15GP22 look to the whole thing. The changer's weird, but looks functional. It'll need a clean/lube though, bigtime.

The hold/size/lin/focus and even brightness, controls are hidden. And the fine tunning. At first, I couldn't imagine that Motoroller would have hidden these all over the chassis. Pulling the on/volume knob gave a hint: a little lever behind there. Sure enough, flipping it allowed the metal piece around the knob to slip off, revealing ALL of the needed adjustments! Here's the trick part: The pilot light serves double duty when the casting's off, allowing you to see the controls (which are marked via a decal). The fine tuning's the same way - with a 70's zenith style adjuster thing that spins around with channel changes. Neat!

The radio is weird - ho hum front end but push pull output. The rectifier's a locktal (!). The radio's amp doesn't serve duty as a TV amp - the TV and radio are almost totally independent of each other.

The TV chassis? Bonkers. Vertical output's a 25L6. Series string, right? Nope - it's transformer, with a second transformer for just that tube. There's 2 5U4s, a bunch of other tubes, and 3 (!) stages of video amp. The HV box has two doorknobs in it, in a doorknob - resistor - doorknob, like a power supply filter. The HV lead unplugs from the top of the box, and the yoke and focus coil unplug, too.

The tube's got a plastic apron over it, which got scuffed by one of the CRT support springs - there was a few layers of tape there.

Now, the bad news: the yoke was stuck to the CRT! Freeing it also freed the tube socket, but thankfully NOT the air. There's enough lead to reglue the socket, but it might not even be worth it: There's a brightener on the tube and the gun assembly looked a bit discolored. And the yoke might be wasted (it's pretty ratty looking, but I might be able to salvage it).

So, we've got a bum CRT, it looks like But the rest of the set is in good shape and looks like it'll clean up and work. There's surprisingly little evidence of repair in the set.

Anyone have any success at rebuilding a 19AP4? Oh, BTW, it's a freaking heavy tube for some reason...