Predicta birth date, does your set have one?
 

Howdy All,

On the inside of the CRT shroud on my Predicta Holiday it has the date 11/25/58 penciled in. I assume that is that date the set was completed. Was this a standard thing for Philco to do? I'm just curious.

Since this year will be the set's 60th birthday I am going to have a TV and cocktail party. I plan on getting it back on the bench to work on a few minor issues so she can look and sound her best at the party.

JOnathan

Penciled in? Probably the date of it's first repair, or the sales date, manufacturing dates are usually stamped in Ink.

Wouldn't be the sales date, they wouldn't take a TV apart just to write that on the inside.

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Maybe the CRT was replaced under warranty? When did Predictas first go on sale?

That set (Predicta Holidays) would have been just months old.

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It had the original 2.3V CRT in it too. Hard to think it went in for a CRT that soon. And why would they take the shroud off for anything but the CRT? I guess it is possible, those tubes were known to be problematic, but I still think it is a completion date. However, if none of you guys have seen this before it is a little odd. It had been in for repairs but much later as one of the caps they replaced was a maroon drop.

Well we know the original tubes were a catastrophe for Philco so I don't think it's at all far fetched for one to fail within months, or even days of going into service.

+1
ISTR the early factory issued predicta CRTs had an obscenely high IN-Warranty failure rate. Twas far from unheard of for a new predicta to have a CRT replacement in the first few months of it's life.

I have a few extra head shells here, so I just looked at them. 1 out of the 4 does have a birth date written inside in pencil, down near the mounting neck. The other 3 had no such markings. Mine's a month older than Jonathan's.

http://www.videokarma.org/attachment...1&d=1530991011

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Maybe the date was penciled in by the Philco employee who assembled them as a sort of "Kilroy was here" type of marking , since it seems to be on some , but not all of the Predictas ?

Cool! Thanks for looking. I see some initials or other writing, what does it say? I think mine might have the intitials too, next time I have the shroud off, I'll look.

Interesting there is at least one more out there. While it could easily be a repair date I'm going to decide to believe it is a birth date. Why? 'Cause I want it to be! ;-)

Maybe I'll ask over on ARF if anybody there has one.

Jonathan, does your CRT have anything written on it? Not that it would mean much if the CRT was replaced that early, but sometimes warranty tubes had the install date written on them, or some other information that it was replaced.

I couldn't make out what it said. I would assume the penciling is just a reference to an assembly procedure or quality checkpoint, similar to all the labels and stamp markings on most TV production lines of that era. If anything, just a bit of trivia at this point in time.

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I seem to remember that mine just had two initials on the shroud. I will check the CRT, it is in a box I can get to fairly easily. All I remember is the tags, but I'll look.