Restoration of RCA 8TS30 #C061765

[ChrisW6ATV]

Hello-

After realizing my CT-100 needs quite a bit of restoration of its own, I decided to work on my 8TS30 to get better experience with a full recap/test/alignment job first. When I first started collecting early TV sets about 1979-80, I was just beginning to learn TV repair (and knew nothing about doing a complete restoration), so I only did the repairs I learned or knew were needed on the sets I did work on, before essentially halting all of the work on my old TVs for 25 years as I followed my still-going career that includes video-display repairs itself. So, despite 30+ years of TV and electronics service work, this one will be my "first" real restoration. Besides plenty of useful experience, I have a good selection of test equipment (often chosen based on what works well at my job), as well as plenty of ideas learned from all of the great people here on Videokarma (and the Antique Radios forum).

I tested the RCA's CRT, and it started almost dead but went into the lower part of the Good scale on my B&K 467 after only a few minutes running in the Clean/Balance mode that boosts the filament voltage, so it is probably good enough to get going, if not plenty bright. It is an RCA 10BP4A from 1950, so it is already a replacement. The chassis also has two 5U4GBs from 1957-58, and a 6BG6GB horizontal output from 1960, so it was kept going at least that long. No obvious problems on the chassis, except a fuse that has had a piece of thick wire-type solder melted to both ends, and a 100 ohm 2 watt resistor that is cracked.