a real challange?
 

And I do mean challenge.
For I have the guts of an old FADA 895 Television.
And I do mean guts, as in no case / enclosure.
The story of this TV, it was built into the wall in a bar in the basement in my grandparents home in Pennsylvania, only the 10 inch screen ( face-place, controls ) could be seen from the bar, and the chassis was in a closet in another room behind.
It was in it when they got the place, and told me it never worked. ( only gave a raster )
when the place was sold, I did not want to see it destroyed, so I had it boxed up and shipped to me.

That was quite a few years ago.

Biggest problem is, no enclosure.
Another problem is, it has been damaged in the moves over the years, 1st IF coil is broken, have all the bits, not sure if it can be fixed.

It's VERY old and has been sitting for almost 40 years.


I'm not sure WHAT it is, but it DOES say FADA 895 on the chassis. And it looks a lot like an RCA 630 chassis.

What ever it is,,, it wont be easy.

According the the Radio museum it was a large combo unit. https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/fada_895895.html

It was almost certainly an RCA 630 design with whatever mods it needed to work with the 12" tube and other components. It may or may not slide right in an RCA Cabinet.

It definitely has a 10bp4 in it, i took it out and tested it last year. ( good emissions )
https://imgur.com/oguZYoC
https://imgur.com/s5WkF39

Are you sure? that looks like a 12" tube to me, or is there another one?

The chassis looks straight up 630.

you are right,, its a 12lp4 ,, the numbers are hard to read because they are rubbed off,
but it is an 895
https://imgur.com/bMoZUb7

The 10 and 12" round CRTs (and IIRC some 16s with the same deflection angle) could be driven by the same unmodified chassis the only difference being CRT/yoke mechanical mounting hardware.

I have a Stromberg Carlson TV-10 which is their TV-12* with a just a wood shim added to the mounting to accommodate the smaller CRT.

* Which is just a rebadged Dumont RA103 Chatham chassis in a Stromberg designed cabinet.

If you can figure out which RCA it best matches getting a new IF can should be fairly easy.
RCA successfully licensed the '630' chassis from 1946 to 1960 (as time went on licensees piled on mods to add AGC and large screen CRT support).

Cabinet wise you could probably use an RCA cabinet or any clone cabinet if you're not set on the exact FADA cabinet. The first two RCA sets the 630TS and 8TS30 used IIRC a wider knob layout than the later ones like the 8T241 and 9T246. Heck you could even build a custom cabinet as homage to the configuration you remember.

If you can't find a 12" cabinet you like you could get a 10" CRT and swap to it....lots of options.

If I do ever attempt to work on it, it will be after I pull the CTC-90 out of storage next year and start to bring that up. I doubt I'll ever find a tube / hybrid set to stick the 25vxxx22 into, & I don't just wanna leave it out for ever getting dust on it, so I might as well have it in a working set in the meantime, and perhaps something may show up later.

I have pretty much done all I can with the CTC-16XL , aside from the IF alignment issues, & the slightly annoying retrace lines that pop up 6% of the time, (most likely will never understand why.)
Now sitting in it's permanent location and used every week or so.

As far as the broken coil on the FADA, the inner core is broken, wire is seen torn off, but all parts are there, fixable, no idea, I would have to carefully remove the bits one day, and look at it under a microscope to see how bad the damage is and if it can even be fixed or not.
It's not that complicated.


https://imgur.com/DTPnF8w

been going through the bits i do have...

face plate :banana:
https://imgur.com/pNFiw9d

speaker.
https://imgur.com/XkgFHPS

inner part of broken coil :(
https://imgur.com/txoI21P

outer
https://imgur.com/issovqc

I may or may not have the knobs someplace in the shed, unsure
if not, I'm sure i can find SOMETHING to work on it at a future date

I'd track down a replacement coil. Life is too short and plenty of rough cabinet 630s get scrapped for CRTs....Someone will have the part.

Aside from that, you are a fairly tedious recap (trust me I've done 2.3 recaps of RCA sets in this family and there is another waiting a turn on my bench), and possibly some power resistors and troubleshooting away from a working chassis. You can get lucky and have it work after just caps....Heck one of the later ones IIRC an 8TK29 console that came into my hands was still going on the radio and had a working TV till the vertical collapsed on the previous owner...Cabinet was in lousy shape so I changed just enough caps and parts for it to work and sold it (thus the 0.3 recap count).

Another option if you know a cabinet maker is to have a custom cabinet made for it in whatever furniture style you fancy....Heck if you reverse the yoke leads you could have a mirror in lid set with a faux pre-WWII looking cabinet.

If it has enough sentimental value to restore, but no cabinet the only limits to the cosmetics are your imagination, resources, and styling sensibilities.

So I guess it was normal for a TV then to have a 12 inch CRT behind a window that was 7.5 inch by 10 :o

That was before the mandate that screen size be viewable area as opposed to the physical dimensions of the picture tube. The round tube also cuts off the sides of the picture anyway, so the window was likely designed with that in mind, so you wouldn't be able to see the picture curving off the edge of the crt face.

As for an enclosure, I was thinking about this for one of my sets... how about making a simple plexiglass box for it, mount the Fada face plate on that, then it'll be like a cool display unit, where you can see the tubes and everything inside.

MadMan-. You stole the words out of my mouth. A wood based and plexiglass sided cabinet would be rather easy, for most anyone, to construct. It would make a fine little show piece. There's a lot of orphaned chassis out there, it's a shame to hide them away forever. Quite a few of us see the beauty, or are just amazed by viewing, these antique electrical Marvel's :)

This guy built a Plexiglas cabinet for his Pilot TV-37 tabletop set:

http://www.electronixandmore.com/res...lot/index.html

Regards,

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