RCA CTC-5 electronic restoration project completed!

[drh4683]

This is the CTC-5 westcott that I bought off ebay from John Marinello back in March. This is an original chicagoland TV set, originally from Park Ridge, IL. Ive had it sitting down in the basement since then and have had the chassis pulled and sitting on another bench out of the way since April.
I actually attempted to sell the set on ebay a few months back, but am glad the reserve was not met. I finally made it important to restore this set and will now be keeping it for the collection. Its too nice.

It only took the replacement of 49 paper wax caps to do most of the job. I used all exact value sprague orange drops were ever I could. Some of the odd values such as .0018uF and .0039uF, I used off brands as they were not available from sprague. Having the weller desoldering station made this job much more efficient and clean.

ESR was bad on only one of the filter caps and was replaced. The others were excellent still and left them alone.

This set was used up until atleast 1971 as there is a repair tag from then. However, the set does not appear to have daily use from new untill that date or else the PC boards would have been toast.

The CRT was changed out in 1959 with a correct RCA 21AXP22. CRT tests very good. I have not raised the heater or rejuvenated the tube. A few tubes got changed out, still a number of original RCA tubes on the chassis, all dated middle year of 1956.

The set was in a very clean home and probably never in a basement as there is no mold/mildue presence or chassis rust.

These sets are quite different when it comes to convergence. I had the service manual to guide me along luckily. After the recap, the set was slowly powered up and had a nice color picture and great sound. It is not even neccessary to align the IF or chroma circuits. The picture is great on this set and should be a reliable set for years to come. Another early roundie is up and running!