No more Tvs at Goodwill

[holmesuser01]

I have a friend that works at Goodwill in their thrift store. He told me that most of the TV's they get dont work at all. They plug them in and see if there is sound and something on the screen before they put it out in the store.

They have just started stacking a bunch of sets on a pallet and charging $35 for the load. I havent seen one of the pallet piles sold, yet. Its always late '80's thru the end of CRT sets that are there.

The other thrift in town routinely destroys sets that use tubes. I saw a destroyed Philco roundie there, once, and asked them to contact me if they ever got another. They've never called, and I mention it to them when I go there.

[Reece]

Some of the thrift stores here have lots of TV's but they are all solid state color CRT's and in good running condition, priced from about $15 up to $75 depending on tube size and apparent quality of the set.

[MRX37]

A new thrift store opened up near my house. No really old TV's though. Oldest I saw was a System 3. Lots of 90's BPC and one big Mitsubishi console TV.

[Glenn Waters]

Most of my house was furnished from thrift stores. My children can prêtty-much tell the year, make and model of most televisions, VCR’s, and even how to load and unload a select-a-vision RCA disk machine. It is not rocket science to install a converter box. But the powers in charge want to make you think you must run down to your local Super Wal-Mart and buy the latest crap slapped together by children and slaves in Asia. That is why so many folks are brain dead these days.
Cora knew this was a 1972 Zenith because she has magazines from the 1970’s, and likes to read about the way it once was in the USA. I even have encyclopedias for them. I think none of the children today have those.


It is easy to appreciate your heritage when you understand that they just are not making this stuff anymore and it is better-put-together than what is new in the super-slave-stores today from China. I cannot tell you how many vintage televisions we have saved from the dump. If I had a warehouse I could fill it up to the top with working made in America console televisions and stereos from the 1960's 70's and 80's that have been left at the dump to be crushed in the compactors. People are so stuck on stupid in this nation, they just do what they are told to do by the news and the powers in charge. I think if the news told people in America to throw away their children they would be lined up at trash compactors the next day with their offspring. Just blindly obeying what they were told was the right, proper, and the modern thing to do.

[sampson159]

that flat chassis zenith is the best set ever made!and an avanti to boot!lucky,lucky man.

[radiotvnut]

Around '92, when I was 15, a TV repairman friend had one of those flat chassis Zenith Avanti's that he'd just put a tripler in. He turned it on; and, it would have come home with me that day had I had the $100 he wanted for it. That set had the best picture that I've ever seen on any TV.

I do have a line on what I think is a 25" Zenith CCII in a steel table model cabinet. It's at the local social security office where a girl I know works and she says they're using the TV and it's cart as a stand to hold a BPC 19" set. The only thing keeping me from getting it is that they need some sort of stand or table that will elevate the 19" set high enough to be seen when the employees are sitting at the conference table. Needless to say, I'm going to try and find them something before it gets tossed or they change their mind.

The girl tells me that its a Zenith solid state chromacolor II and that it has a sliding volume control. I suspect it probably uses the vertical chassis or one of the last flat chassis. I have seen some "E" line flat chassis sets labeled as CCII.

[sampson159]

sliding volume is a vertical chassis set.those are also great sets.i have one and a spare chassis.they are both promised to other members though.i want a flat chassis zenith to keep forever.just to remember the days when zenith was king,rca was american made and sylvania had the best crt.all this was too brief and like a meteor in the sky,it burned out much too fast.what days those were and what times we had!

[Glenn Waters]

I saw this on a site for a recycling center that was giving some kind of high-definition LCD store coupons to folks who wanted to dispose of old their televisions at their crush and destroy recycling center. It made me sick to think some numskull left this beautiful lady there to be trashed.

If we were to tell Americans back in the 1950’s or even the 1960's that folks would do stupid things like that; and that one day we will owe Communist China billions and billions of dollars, and all our manufacturing plants will be over in China they think we were telling some kind of crazy joke. But I guess the laugh is on us these days.

[radiotvnut]

OMG, I did not need to see that Zenith sitting there waiting to be crushed. I think that's one of the first Avanti sets and it uses the 4-tube hybrid chassis. Darn thing probably still works and is capable of making a better picture than any cheap LCD throwaway POS.

Speaking of Goodwill, I was just at my local SA and was very disappointed. The only TV's in the place were a BPC 25" set for them to watch and a late '70's-early '80's white Quasar 12" B&W priced at $15.00 They also had a cheap plastic solid state early '70's radio priced at $26. Both prices were scribbled directly on the cases.

[superdeez]

Well, like it or not, nothing does last forever.

As I write this, I'm watching a 1983 RCA 12" B&W portable that's been my daily watcher on-and-off since I was about 8 or so. In the early 90s, that was just an old TV to shove in a kid's room. Since then in my various travels since moving on my own, I've had a few other "better" color sets.

Most weren't anything collectors like yourselves would be interested in. I had a 1983 15" color GE die while I was asleep. Beautiful set, hardly used, the convergence was still sharp as a tack even. The only reason I got the TV was because it wouldn't tune above channel 43 on cable. Still, when I fell asleep to Seinfeld and woke up to a room full of electronics smoke so thick I could see it as a blue haze, I just dropped the carcass off at the curb and let nature run its course. It could have been the flyback, but I had other things going on in life at the time, and didn't feel compelled to go searching for parts and tearing everything apart. That was in 2008.

I had a 1986 era Magnavox color that I got from my barber when the shop was closing for probably $10. The original remote was even with the set, and it worked just fine, despite being a really high hours set with some random arc in the HV and acting a little squirrley sometimes. It was left behind when I got involved with the wrong woman. Sometimes I wish I'd gone back to get it, but with how all that went down, it was better off just being lost in the shuffle. I still have the remote.

But through it all, the Black&White has at the very least been a backup, and at present I see no need to spend money to replace it. Besides, I've kinda grown attatched to the little guy. I remember watching the OJ trial, Oklohama City, 9/11 coverage on this thing. I hope to be able to fix it when something goes down, but for now it's been playing close to three decades without ever having been cracked open.

As far as saving things, though, people on this site have even made fun of me for saving all of the solid state clock radios I have. But most all of them work, although I'd love to kjnow how to fix the keypad on my GE 4880.

[radiotvnut]

Originally Posted by superdeez

Well, like it or not, nothing does last forever.

As I write this, I'm watching a 1983 RCA 12" B&W portable that's been my daily watcher on-and-off since I was about 8 or so. In the early 90s, that was just an old TV to shove in a kid's room. Since then in my various travels since moving on my own, I've had a few other "better" color sets.

Most weren't anything collectors like yourselves would be interested in. I had a 1983 15" color GE die while I was asleep. Beautiful set, hardly used, the convergence was still sharp as a tack even. The only reason I got the TV was because it wouldn't tune above channel 43 on cable. Still, when I fell asleep to Seinfeld and woke up to a room full of electronics smoke so thick I could see it as a blue haze, I just dropped the carcass off at the curb and let nature run its course. It could have been the flyback, but I had other things going on in life at the time, and didn't feel compelled to go searching for parts and tearing everything apart. That was in 2008.

I had a 1986 era Magnavox color that I got from my barber when the shop was closing for probably $10. The original remote was even with the set, and it worked just fine, despite being a really high hours set with some random arc in the HV and acting a little squirrley sometimes. It was left behind when I got involved with the wrong woman. Sometimes I wish I'd gone back to get it, but with how all that went down, it was better off just being lost in the shuffle. I still have the remote.

But through it all, the Black&White has at the very least been a backup, and at present I see no need to spend money to replace it. Besides, I've kinda grown attatched to the little guy. I remember watching the OJ trial, Oklohama City, 9/11 coverage on this thing. I hope to be able to fix it when something goes down, but for now it's been playing close to three decades without ever having been cracked open.

As far as saving things, though, people on this site have even made fun of me for saving all of the solid state clock radios I have. But most all of them work, although I'd love to kjnow how to fix the keypad on my GE 4880.

I've got a couple of those little RCA's. One's a '77 and one's an '81. RCA made a billion of those between the late '70's and late '80's and they don't give a whole lot of trouble.

People make fun of me for keeping all this old "junk" of mine; but, at least it still works and I can repair it when it dies. We were just leaving wal-mart and saw not one, but two, broken Sanyo flat screens being returned. I actually talked to one lady, who said wal-mart told her to take it up with the manufacturer. I told here that I repaired TV's and advised her not to buy electronics from wal-mart. As we were leaving, I asked my Mother, "Now, do you sort of understand why I choose to keep my older TV's?"