RCA 630TCS is home
 

I purchased this RCA 630TCS from another collector and neglected to pick it up for the longest time... kept slipping my mind.

Anyway, it was finally delivered this morning. It has a previous "restoration" of lackluster quality (Nick Williams would know exactly what I'm talking about :lmao:) that will need to be cleaned up (no HV at the moment for starters), and the cabinet needs considerable work to get it in "showroom" quality, but it'll be a fun winter project. The 630 chassis is my favorite chassis to play with.

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Thanks for posting the pictures Ben. I've been curious about the type of cabinets some of the early RCA chassis came in. Your cabinet doesn't look all that bad from your pictures. Sure beats the condition of a RCA 8T241 I finished recapping last night. I like the style of your set.:yes:
Ed

I remembered seeing production figures on this set somewhere and finally tracked it down. According to a post on ARF from Chuck Azzalina, the 8,585 of the 630TCS were built, compared to about 16,000 621TS, and 43,000 630 tabletops. I'd be interested to know if production figures survive for the 641, and the two projection sets. They must have all been much less than 5,000 each.

So this set has turned out to be a comedy of errors from the start. There was one wiring mistake in the HV cage from the previous owner. Fixed that.

Still no raster, or so I thought. Turn out the lights and I find a very dim weak raster. Then I remember him mentioning quite a while ago that the brightness circuit is bust. Fair enough, I can deal with that in the morning.

Then I decide to test the damn tube before going to bed. The tube is D E A D. I thought my Beltron was malfunctioning when I tested the jug. Nope, it's just the worst under-vacuum 10BP4 known to man. Thank God I have spares...

That must be one of the most underrated and little often seen early post-war TV's around. When they come up for sale they often get overlooked for some reason. I personally think it has very cool pre-war looking details and you can't beat the 630 chassis. It's an excellent find! Good luck with the resto.

I agree. Out of all the 46 and 47 model year RCA sets, this is my third favorite, only behind the 648PTK and the 730TCS. The table tops are rather ugly, as is the big 641.

Good choices, but I must say that the 630TS and 8TS30 are beautiful sets when you see them in person. I have a 630 mainly because it's a piece of TV history. The one that really started the ball rolling with TV in America.

We're snowed into our building, so I figured I'd work on this set while I had some spare time. I changed out the 10BP4 for a marginal, but usable, Sylvania. It made a night and day difference. The previous "restoration" left about one third of the wax caps in place. I changed out most of those and plugged her back in for a sanity check.

I still have a long way to go, but I'm well on my way.

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Another thing I really hadn't noticed about this set until I saw one in person at the first or second ETF convention I attended is that the upper 2/3 of the cabinet is sloped back and the CRT is tilted at an ever so slight angle up. In this respect it reminds me of some of the early British sets. It certainly makes glare from ceiling fixtures a bit more of an issue though. Motorola had the right idea with their color sets; angle the CRT ever so slightly down toward the floor.

Congradulations on a nice set. You've gone a long way.

Great job so far. So cool to see one of these in action. Those early Jackie Gleason Show "Honeymooners" sketches are just as a good as the "classic 30" and a great choice to watch on these early sets! Continued success.