Scored a CTC-86
 

I overheard a conversation at school the other day, some girl's grandparent died, and they were having an estate sale. Asked if there were any old TV's and there were. The outbuilding had some 80's stuff, and in the garage was a CTC-86. They said I could have as many TV's as I want for free. So I grabbed a CTC-117 knob tuned and I'm going back tomorrow for the console. It's a delta gun. The green tested extremely weak at the sale. I popped it with the auto restore on the CR 70, and it came back pretty well. Also the vertical is dead.

You did well!

Here are some of the other sets. Might also grab the System 3.

Looks as if the channel selector knob on the RCA console is wrong for that model; may be a replacement for a missing one. It is very difficult from this distance to tell what TV the knob presently on the tuner is from, and I don't want to guess. :scratch2:

BTW, it seems you will be in pretty much the same situation an VK member bandersen, in Chicago, is in at this time. I don't envy you having to take all the TVs in your collection to Wisconsin when you move there this summer. The cost of renting two or more moving vans, one for your furniture, etc. and the other(s) for the TVs, could be and probably will be sky-high, especially considering the distance you will be driving. However, since you have mentioned having another house to store your TVs in until you can sort things out, that may not be a problem for you.

Also, the weather in Wisconsin will be much, much different from what you are used to in Birmingham. As you no doubt know, Wisconsin is one of the Great Lakes states and gets very cold winters, not to mention lots of snow. The winters are very long in that part of the country as well. I live in northeastern Ohio (another Great Lakes state) and get a lot of snow in winter, but from what I understand, Wisconsin gets a heck of a lot more.

The Great Lakes region is probably one of the snowiest regions of the US aside from Buffalo and Syracuse, New York or Minneapolis, Minnesota. There was a blizzard here in northeastern Ohio in the winter of 1978 that darn nearly paralyzed the area for several days. I was 22 years old and living in an eastern Cleveland suburb at the time, and remember getting at least a foot of snow in front of my garage during the worst of it; my next-door neighbor had snow halfway up the side door of her house as well.

I don't mean to scare you with all this talk about snow in the Great Lakes region. I don't know how familiar you are with that area of the US, although I think you may have been to Wisconsin more than once already, since you mentioned your dad has relatives there. I am only trying to make a point: Visiting there is one thing, but pulling up stakes and moving there is another matter altogether.

Because you will be moving there from Alabama, it will take you quite a while to get used to the Great Lakes area's weather, which as I stated is much different from that of the Birmingham area. Since you have stated in some of your recent posts here, however, that you like cold weather and apparently want to leave Alabama for good, the GL region's very cold winters probably won't bother you a bit.

Anyway, I wish you good luck when you make your move, and hope everything works out for you. Again, coming to Wisconsin from Alabama will take some getting used to, but I think you will be just fine.

Noice!

I went back to the sale today and got the console, a couple portables, and a 1987 Zenith Thithtem Thwee. All for free. They told me any TV's I don't take are going to the dump. I can't allow that, now can I? The portables are a 1976 RCA B&W and an early 80's Magnavox color.

Strange weather patterns in Wisconsin!
 

It's been a strange winter!
One or two days, 50's and 60's, next day 6" of heavy snow, for a February! Record highs for certain days.
In some of the past years, a whole week of sub-zero temps. Some Januarys, the temp never gets above freezing. It takes some getting used to, even for me, as I've lived in WI. all my life.
Heavy snowfalls seldom hinders us, as our population isn't as large as other larger cities.
According to the weather report, it's supposed to get up to the high 50's, low 60's this Monday. :thmbsp:

Dave,
Did you grab the large white Zenith Portable 25 inch set ? We have a black one from 1988 that my son uses daily to play video games on. I got from a man who dropped it on the floor, but it still works. Got the set 22 yrs ago.
Ed

And we know how to drive in all kinds of snow and ice, not like those southern states where people panic with any hint of snow or ice.

Also, you can always dress warm (in layers) up here to handle the cold. There's not much you can do for heat relief in the summers down south when the temperature and humidity are both near 100 except hide inside with the air conditioning.

I'd rather deal with the cold.

.

Thanks for the forecast. I have to go out towards Iowa Monday to pick up a B&W set.:yes:

I cleaned up the CTC-86 tonight, and I think it looks quite good. The vertical is still dead though.

CTC-86 and friends
 

Also got the CTC-86's friends cleaned up. Little bitty 12" B&W portable (Taiwanian) and Panasonic made color portable. Both work fine.

Couple of nice saves there! That system 3 cabinet style is pretty scarcely-found in my area, I've only seen one in the white color. Not bad sets, IIRC this is the chassis that gets intermittent startup; where the LED readout and tuner appear to work but it is dead otherwise. If that happens, there is a psu capacitor that gets cooked by the regulator heatsink and needs changing. One of the 160v parts but I don't recall the capacitance value.

And yes those Taiwan made b&w sets are usually found working 100% still, much like any solid state b&w chassis. Only seen one problem with them, which is dim tube due to hard use. Recently picked up a Zenith Video Sentinel system which is a 12" b&w s.s. tv/monitor and a microphone and vidicon camera which patches in via a DIN-type connector on the rear of the set. It is Taiwan made and worked as found with a weak tube..Wrapped the tube with two turns of no.18 gauge wire fed into the filament supply. Bright as day and good contrast. made in 1979.

Interesting about the Magnavox-Panasonic connection. My '80 Magnavox 13" color uses a Matsushita horizontal output TO-3 but the IC chipset appears to be American sourced.

Could you please explain this procedure, both the thought behind it and the procedure itself?

Thanks.

.

The B&W RCA tube tested weak, all I did was use the Auto Restore feature on the Sencore CR70 and it came back perfectly. The Zenith Thithtem Thwee is actually woodgwain, not white.

Ah, woodgwain eh? Yep that is the common color around here for that set, too.

I haven't had the best of luck rejuvenating these 12ers.. Usually they would come up like new and fad quickly with normal use.. Have recently exhibited this in a '74 Panasonic(which instant-on likely killed) and many others over the years.
Folks around here used these little sets as kitchen TVs apparently right up into the DTV transition. They were wildly popular and often have dead crts. FWIW, I use B and K testers/restorers exclusively, with the 466 being my go-to for most monochrome sets.
Regarding 'wrapping' the filament-Since the majority of SS chassis use fly derived filament supply, if you carefully put a couple of turns of addt'l wire around the flyback core and connect in unison to the existing hookup, you theoretically increase the typical 6.3v value by a volt or two. It can certainly open the filament if you go too wild with it. I average 8.something volts to elicit a brighter raster without blowing the tube open. I would not recommend this on a valuable set but it is a fine trick for the run o the mill jap 12" b/w..

Okay. It originally sounded like you wrapped a couple turns around the neck of the CRT. Couldn't make any sense of that.

.

Oops yeah I should have been more clear.
Back to the original post, What did the CTC-117 need? Only issues I've seen on that one were the metal filter can cap being marginal..that would cause a wavy pattern in the video. The crts that went into those early eighties color RCAs were pretty damn good in my opinion. My ctc-97 19" from '80 has many hours on it and looks fantastic still. someof the late seventies RCAs had really bad tubes however..had an old '77 CTC-89 with a stone cold dead blue gun and weak r and g as well. In fact, I am unsure when ColorTrak came out but the earliest ones all had guns with lost emissivity to the point where they couldn't be lined-up for proper monochrome pix. By the eighties (til say '85) I never saw substantial RCA weak tube syndrome

The CTC-107 (not 117) works, it's just really dirty and the side is slightly melted.

there was a shop aprox 1 block from us.they would wrap every picture tube on every set.offered a 49.00 crt replacement.we got more than half of them in our shop.they were in business about 4 to 5 years before they shut down.some of those had 4 to 5 wraps on the flyback.many good crts were ruined by this practice.

Crazy. We did some wraps & filament resistor jumps but only
the last resort. Best thing is it got the sets out of the
shop instead of abandoned...........

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

The vertical on the 86 is usually caused by bad 220K resistors on the vertical module. Change all of them. That set can produce an incredible picture when working right. We rarely saw those in here. If we did, it was vertical and tuner.

Looks just like the knob RCA intended - the set/knob on the cover of the RCA service manual looks just like Dave's.

+1 for any set using the MDG module. There is also an axial cap, 22uF, that hangs off one of the supplies that will also cause some serious vertical issues, but always start with the 220K 1/2w resistors. The CTC85 and up sets were the first RCAs we sold new - and the modules at first gave everyone fits. RCA paid warranty only to the module level, but was short on modules, and so we had to troubleshoot the modules, unpaid, to keep some customers happy. Once you got the bugs out, those sets stayed gone for good, save for a lightning strike, or a "hot" Oak cable box that would eat the tuners. Cox had some fault cable boxes with upwards of 60VAC on the shield of the f-fitting. We saw only a couple, but scary....

Thanks for letting me know. I was thinking it was a shorted transistor.

Boy do I remember the early cable boxes. More than the Oak had 60 volts on them. I got to the point where I would "scratch" the cable on the F connector to see if a small spark appeared. If not, the customer wondered why the tech would jump when connecting them.
Overall, the 86 and the 40 were just about my favorite solid state RCA TV's. I always liked working on the 86. Also, I never remember changing a tripler in any. Zenith ate the lions share of triplers. Especially the wonderful early selenium ones!

The CTC86 was a rare chassis to see. Always looked
good. Its the last RCA modular set. The 220K resistors
were also a common fail on the newer replacement "unitized"
chassis along with what looks like a vert out transistor
but RCA called it something else. The unitized kept us busy
with FBT's, audio, bridges & vert problems. The '86 seemed
to be very reliable but I thnks they built few of them.

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

Put a new vertical module in the CTC-86 today. Still no vertical sweep. Now I'm thinking the yoke is bad.

I may be remembering the wrong set, but look for a four tab electrolytic that is above ground and usually gray plastic covered. If I remember right, that set has a vertical output coupling capacitor. I remember changing a few. It may be hiding under the chassis and be a regular looking cap but I remember the twist lok....... I'll have to dig out a schematic when I get to the shop tomorrow.