CL find Dumont

[earlyfilm]

Originally Posted by cdmarion

I've always heard that the early Dumonts were very high quality tv's.

In 1959, I worked at an Atlanta TV repair shop, with a retired QC inspector who had worked on the assembly line at Dupont. He told the story that one of QC's final tests on a completed chassis was to give the power transformer a gentle tap with a 5 pound rubber mallet and if the picture blinked, they sent the chassis back as a reject. He said on the first day of production on the 1949 test production line, they had 100% rejection. Management shut the line down and moved the workers to another line. A few days later, management reopened the line with one sole change. They eliminated the mallet test.

This story came about because a late 1940's Dumont set came in for repair with horizontal problems that looked sync related. Swapping the suspected tubes did nothing and I could not locate a schematic for it. He walks over, grabs my voltmeter, and correctly diagnosis the problem in under 30 seconds without even looking to see what the tube layout was, or for that matter, what the inverted chassis was. It would have been an understatement to say that I was dumbfounded.