Help me identify this Zenith?

[AlanInSitges]

Glad you're enjoying it, Dave! I'll fill in a bit more information you and others might find interesting. Getting back into TVs over here has been a fascinating experience. So much to learn about the way things worked and were built in Europe that I had never been exposed to, and the surprisingly big role some American companies played in the market here. I think the American stuff was likely political in nature. Spain was still a dictatorship until 1975, and I have a feeling that their relative pariah status enabled the US government to help out by setting up American companies here. I don't know for sure that's the case, and the few conversations I've tried to have aren't really something people want to discuss a whole lot.

Anyway.

So, neither my Zenith, nor the others you have seen, were export models. They were built in a Zenith factory right here in Barcelona.



Zenith Radio Corporation set up a joint venture here, bankrolled a factory, and started building sets based on American models with a mix of imported American and European-sourced parts. Pre color, the sets were nearly identical to their US counterparts. I have a couple of boat anchor 12" B&W sets that, aside from an autoformer and switch to select the mains voltage, have identical chassis in every way that I can see to an American set. I have the Sams for a 13M15 chassis, mine is a 13X15, and all the parts - tubes, electrolytics, are American, and all the values of components in the sweep circuits, etc., are unchanged. The text on the back is in Spanish, saying it was built here, and the VHF knob has those dorky European channels like E on it.




I also have a Philco set based on the American 14J41 ("The Townhouse") chassis. As opposed to setting up their own factory, Philco contracted with a local company to produce sets based on American designs using a mix of parts. My set has all original markings - chassis number, cabinet back with the notice in English about complying with FCC regulations, everything, but the luxury tax stamp on the chassis indicates it was built by Iberia Radio, who sold sets under their own brand and produced for a bunch of others - I have seen Emerson and Westinghouse sets built by them using European designs. My Philco has a different power transformer than the American one, and the power supply has been heavily adapted to work here. The chassis itself, PCBs, and tubes are all identical to the Sams, but almost all the passive components were locally sourced, with Bianchi electrolytics that are all still good. Lots of bodges, capacitors tacked under the PCB, etc., and the tuners are completely different than what's in the Sams. I haven't ever seen a Zenith ad in Spain, but Philco were ALL OVER IT, with heavy print campaigns and they even got Miss America to come over here and pose for a picture with one of their fancy Yankee TV sets. They leaned into the fact that they produced (I think) a camera tube used on one of the moon missions to claim that the US government trusted them for the new era of Philco space exploration. No comment.


I have tons of pictures of the insides of these weird-o sets if anyone is interested, along with a GE built by Philips.

Back to the Zenith at hand. I'm taking the yoke off of an old Philips I have and will see if I can get the 1077 going. That's the plan for today.