Rca Ctc-15

[Charlie]

Tonight I decided to hook up a picture toob to this CTC15 chassis. The only CRT I felt safe plugging in was in a wooden CTC11 set... this particular set's toob has severe cataracts and is weak on one of the guns, but works. I yanked the 11 chassis out, and half-ass squeezed the 15 chassis partially into the cabinet. It's not pretty, but will do for testing purposes.

After plugging the horz output tube back in, I had the pleasant sound of soft HV crackle, and then light on the screen with stations tuning in good... so good that I actually got a few Houston stations 90 miles away in addition to our own by only using an 18 inch jumper wire as an antenna.

The picture looked a bit out of focus, but that's likely from the cataracts... they're pretty bad all the way to the center of the screen. Looks like the color circuits are working as well. I let it run for 15 minutes and then decided it was way past bedtime.

Tomorrow I'll run it some more and do a few checks here and there. The chassis needs all of the pots cleaned, but was out of cleaner spray so I'll get some in the morning. Still got a few caps to upgrade with orange drops.

Since things are looking positive for this chassis so far, I'll get started on stripping the cabinet that it's going in. Feels good to know I'm making progress!

I was going to take some pictures of tonight's progress, but realized I left my camera at the camp today. Oh well. Here's a photo of the 11 that the 15 is squeezed into. As you can see, it needs some serious eye surgery!