My new CTC-11!
 

Just picked this up from a seller on Craigslist in Hillbillyville, TN. Paid $100 for it. Numbers matching CRT. Haven't tested it yet, but the cathodes don't look too burned. I had to take it apart on the spot to get it in the car.

Great find !
 

When there is a will.... There is a way.
Good luck with it.

Yep. You really can't appreciate how BIG this thing is until you get right next to it. This thing absolutely dwarfs my Zenith 25CC50 table model. And it's a 25"!

No! Where there's a will, there's relatives! :D
I hauled one of those in the trunk of my '64 Valiant. Naturally, the trunk was up. I wrapped a moving blanket around it and tied the trunk, so it wouldn't bounce up and down. :scratch2:

Happy for you! I have one exactly like that waiting for repair/restoration. RCA must have made many of those in black. Hope your CRT tests like new! :yes:
Kevin

Still on the road home. When I get it unloaded, expect many more pix.

The CRT is good! I had to use the Auto Restore on the CR70, and it responded extremely well. The base broke though.

Here's how the CRT tests on my newly repaired B+K 470. This way you can see all three guns at the same time. I also tried my B&K 445, and there must be something wrong with that tester, because it tested very weak. This tube has the old school sulfide phosphor too, that's pretty cool.

Good score, U.D.! That chassis is clean, not tarnished or rusty, and the Yoke plastic housing is still white! These make excellent pictures, with a restoration! Nice to see in the black lacquer metal cabinet, I have a CTC-10A in the same cabinet. I like to test crt's with my B&K also, to see all three guns at once, but I do not recommend using the B&K to do rejuvinations, as the Sencore CR-70 is much more gentle and gradual, especially the Auto-Restore. This is my own experienced opinion, after trials and errors in the past!

I forgot to mention, the roundie in my Avatar picture, is an RCA, CTC-11, that I restored, and used to own, now another collector friend of mine owns it!

Great set you got there, and the only RCA I would recommend to a beginner for restoring. These RCA's did not suffer the heat issues later sets did either.

I have the "Covington" in mahogany print on metal, which I believe yours is also. A fellow VK member traded me mine for a Zenith roundie. The model number on yours would be one number off for the black finish, 212-G-802 MV, 2=ebony. Not at all surprised on the CRT coming up like it did.


Dave- yours looks like it has UHF too. I never saw a CTC11 with the UHF tuner.

Nope, no UHF here. Or high voltage, or horizontal oscillation. On the way home, a coil right next to the 6FQ7 horizontal oscillator broke, and the teeny tiny lead got ripped off. I don't really think that one little coil would kill the high voltage and horizontal oscillation though. I might be replacing the flyback...

Edit - I must be super tired or sumpthin, I realized that if the horizontal oscillator coil is broke, it will kill the HV and horizontal oscillator. DUH...

I can't clearly see in your picture where that wire is broken, but if it's right where it solders to the terminal it should be possible to carefully tin the coil wire and bridge the gap with another short strand of fine wire. Or did the whole coil form break off above the pc board?

There's a handy little trick for stripping hair-fine wires that doesn't involve abrading. It may be useful more often than you'd think. Scroll down to post# 26 -
http://videokarma.org/showthread.php...hlight=aspirin

If you can't fix it the ETF shows one available on there parts for sale page: RCA 109251 coil horiz http://www.earlytelevision.org/flybacks.html

Resoldered the wire back on the terminal. Still dead as a hammer. No audio either. Something's fishy. I'm getting tubes glowing, but there seems to be no B+ at all.

Did you check for continuity across the circuit breaker? Sometimes those contacts can be flaky when the set has been setting unused for a long spell. That circuit breaker only affects the B+.

I didn't check the continuity, but I did spray it and move it back and forth a bunch. The Kill-A-Watt said that it drew 119 watts, .99 amp, and had a .97 power factor.

You can access the B+ where the voltage doubler diodes are mounted to the terminal strip on the top side of the chassis. B+ is the anode side of the one diode where the red (or orange?)wire heads off to the filter choke. Those diodes are M1, M2 on the sams schematic. Normally there's about 400 volts DC at that red wire.

Just paralleled a fuse in across the circuit breaker, it blew. Just in the time it took for the fuse to blow, TWO of the filter cans got really warm. The 160μF at 250 volts is dead shorted. Broke the terminal off, and was able to get audio but STILL no raster. The horizontal still might not be running, I saw the 6DQ5 red plating.

Sounds like you're going to have some recapping fun. I just took a look at my 11 chassis and the B+ is the red/white wire on that terminal strip lug closest to the back of the chassis. The red/green wire is where to two diodes anode and cathode join together in the center of the terminal strip. Those two 160uf caps along with the two diodes form the voltage doubler, so they definitely need to be healthy and reasonably matched in value caps. I just rebuilt the can caps in my 11 two weeks ago and they are not the easiest things to get at.

Unfortunately, I'm no longer a member at my local radio club, and have no access to components of any sort. I'm going to be organizing my garage this week, so that will at least give me space to work.

Can your friend Danny help you find the correct parts? These 10's and 11's are especially crowded under the chassis in the filter cap area. I have heard of some folks finding room under the chassis to replace caps, but that did not look like a viable option to me. There's too many wires that need those cap terminals as tie points, and so little space to add any terminal strips.

Yeah, I talked to him last night. I'll be going back over there soon to get a picture tube and other stuff, I'll get him to help me fix it up.

I rearranged a little bit...
 

The CTC-11 is extremely HUGE. So much so that the only way to get it in my room was to take the door off the hinges. When I got it in my room, I had to lift it straight up in a cramped space to get it on top of the Admiral combo. I feel really stupid now for not taking the chassis out beforehand, since it has to come out anyway. It hangs over the Admiral on all four sides. The only way to use the record player is to slide the TV over. I feel pretty bad for the Admiral though. I'm not comfortable with it carrying so much weight.

I would replace all the electrolytics at the top of the chassis. My CTC9C nearly lost it's power transformer from one of them being just slightly leaky. No heating on the can but a HOT power transformer. Replacing them made the transformer run warm but I can give the set its four hour weekly run with no problem.
The CTC11 is a great set!

Spent about 45 minutes cleaning up the exterior of the set today. Used Novus No.1 on all the knobs except the channel knob since it's falling apart. Used Invisible Glass on the front glass and CRT, and they are both nearly spotless. Used a toothpick to clean in between the grooves on the black knobs at the bottom. Going to see Danny this weekend, the set will be getting all new lytics and a flyback. I'm looking forward to seeing this set working!

Met up with my friend Gene today and did some swapping. I gave him my 1962 RCA B&W portable, and he gave me an NOS flyback and other stuff for my CTC-11.

Well you can't beat having friends with Roundie TV parts! :D

Is your 11's fly know to be bad, or is it a "just-in-case" spare?

I looked at the fly that's in there, and it looks pretty good, except that the HV rectifier tube plug in thing (I'm too tired for this) is crispy.

If the wire for the HV rect tube top cap is not too crispy then it is a trivial matter to change the top cap.....If the wire insulation is crispy 2-6 layers of heat shrink tubing over it ought to help.

On the road home from Danny's now. Took him two hours of work to get the chassis working. Many pictures and updates to come.

CTC-11 is back together and working perfectly.

Already starting to have a slightly annoying problem with this thing. The brightness and tint knobs are concentrically centred, and even though I put some lubrication in there, the two knobs are sticking together. And also the convergence has already drifted WAY off just in the two hours since I finished it. Guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow afternoon.

Seems odd that the convergence would go off on its own for no reason. Did you by any chance move the TV? Changing its orientation (for example, rotating 90 degrees in a room) can mess up the purity, as I learned once when I moved my first CTC-11. The result isn't the same as bad convergence, but it can give you some weird colors.

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

http://antiqueradio.org/art/RCACTC-11PurityRedux2.jpg

That's one thing I've definitely noticed on these old sets. Once you get the convergence looking acceptable, expect to take the back off again very shortly. My Admiral and most other 60's sets do the same exact thing. What's really annoying is when you get it looking good, and mess with it to fix one little spot, and it throws the whole thing out of whack. Happened yesterday.

The convergence cloverleaf can shift very easily on the smooth neck surface when you're moving those static magnets. I've seen where some techs wrap a layer or two of vinyl electrical tape around the area where the cloverleaf rests. Gives the cloverleaf something to bite into.

Unfortunately, my mother is taking all day to be a social butterfly at my expense. Almost every Sunday, I get drugged to church and then out so she can socialize, so it will be many hours before I make it back home to work on the set. I wanted to change a picture tube today, but at this rate, I'll be happy to get home before 7.

Looking at the pix in post 33, I would work on the vertical linearity first. Convergence at the top of the screen will likely be much better when the linearity problem is fixed.

jr

On the convergence panel there's a little selenium stack which is likely bad and can cause shifting-convergence woes. It's either 3 or 4 sections (can't remember which) and can be replaced with fast-switching type Si diodes.