What were some the common faults in mid-60s Moterola color sets?

[Stuff663]

Tomorrow I’ll be getting a Motorola Color/65 as they called it in the advertising material and I’ve always felt that every company had some sort of fault with their products. Like RCA flybacks or that one compactor in the chromacolors. Well, what’s Motorola’s color faults of the era; I figure it’d be a good way to know where to start if something is wrong (which there almost definitely will be; I can tell from the pictures and local history that this set has been underwater at least twice).

[Electronic M]

There were books speciffic to brand that will give you that info and much more.

Chassis is the best identifier it should begin with TS and have three numbers folowing. Such as TS908 or TS918.

Motorola for a while used a single tube color circuit, PIL I think they called it, that would take the color burst and bandpass amp signals create it's own reference oscillation and act as demodulator and video amp.....It worked but it never looked good compared to anything else (even the GE portacolor color circuits were better). There would be both a tint and hue control on those.

Water damage can be a non-issue or make a set too much of a mess to bother with...You have to make the call if it is worth the effort to you. Look it over carefully and evaluate if it has mold issues beyond your tolerance.

[trinescope]

There is also the 23EGP22 CRT if that's what your set uses. They had a short lifespan when new and usually are worn out if found today.

About the 6LE8 color demodulator circuit, I ran across a trade magazine article about the use of vectorscope in color TV servicing. These allow you to see how the TV is demodulating a gated rainbow test signal. Ideally you see 10 equally spaced and equal length "spokes" on the display. The article showed a Zenith, RCA, and Motorola. The Zenith looked nearly perfect, the RCA nearly so, and the Motorola looked way off although it was taken from a normally operating set. The B-Y signal was much less than the R-Y and the demodulating angle was wrong. I guess they compensated for it with the Y signal amplitudes at the CRT cathodes or with the "tint" control which changes the grayscale red and blue values.

I have a TS-918 I'm working on right now that I have had problems with the color circuits. I get a hue shift when advancing the color intensity control, but I have done the video and chroma IF alignment and it adjusted OK, so I will replace the 6LE8 as soon as it arrives in the mail. That and the HV rectifier that just decided to die for no apparent reason.

[julianburke]

The 23EGP22 picture tubes--I second that motion.

[KentTeffeteller]

Originally Posted by julianburke

The 23EGP22 picture tubes--I second that motion.

I third that motion. As a junior technician, when these sets were elderly, often as not the CRT was either bad, or on it's way toward replacement. The early Motorola color demodulation circuitry wasn't no great shakes either and wasn't up to the rest of the competition.

[Electronic M]

Just realized y'all are talking about MOTOR-OLA and the OP was talking about MOTE-ROLA....

The bigest problems with Mote-rola sets is that they are filled with alligators, have a wall on one side guarded by archers (and bad mouthed Frenchman if you believe Monty Python and the Holy Grail), a marauding army on the other side and a hungry dragon guarding the sky's above.

[Sandy G]

Hehehehehe...Love it, Tom !

[zeno]

All kidding aside the one thing I most remember was a couple of big brown resistors in the demod IIRC. They would open & you could see a stripe
around them. The EGP was a dog. I also remember the color was
quite different kinda like an early JVC "HiFi Color" set. Construction was
as solid as Zenith but the wiring not. They are a real love or hate set.
In the PCB days with tubes they really dried up.

73 Zeno
LFOD !

[JohnCT]

I wasn't particularly fond of them but I do remember one Motorola I was on a house call for and I found that when I tried to install a tube, the socket crumbled into dust.

Back at the shop, I had to change two or three other sockets that had deteriorated. That was the only one I ever saw like that but I never forgot it.

John

[KentTeffeteller]

Originally Posted by zeno

All kidding aside the one thing I most remember was a couple of big brown resistors in the demod IIRC. They would open & you could see a stripe
around them. The EGP was a dog. I also remember the color was
quite different kinda like an early JVC "HiFi Color" set. Construction was
as solid as Zenith but the wiring not. They are a real love or hate set.
In the PCB days with tubes they really dried up.

73 Zeno
LFOD !

The Motorola sets with PCB and tubes didn't age very well. They were reasonably reliable their first 5 years, then got progressively less reliable as they aged. A lot of those sets got retired by the 1970-1974 time frame. Wiring on them always a problem area to varying degrees. My boss then at the TV repair shop hated seeing one come in. I dealt with one of those color chassis which had to have a new EGP CRT replacement, 4 tube sockets, and those big brown resistors and a lot of wiring. I got that job, I got the set working, but it was a challenge. It had come back 3 times in one month prior to that. Owner worked for ORNL, was something of a legend for thriftiness. Around 18 months later, that set came back, and deemed unrepairable. Mr. Thrifty bought the top of the line Zenith Chromacolor II from the shop to replace that Moto. That set outlived him, his neighbor in Oak Ridge still uses it on a converter box.