[Electronic M]

On Wednesday I dropped a used rebuilt light engine (CRT) into the Packard...Nappa was out of 21FBP22s but luckily my Sylvania dealer came through. The Packard's old light engine was the original numbers matching bulb. The packard may not be numbers matching anymore, but now I don't have to turn the lights off to watch it.



Taking it apart for the CRT swap heightened my appreciation of the engineering/design that went into this set. They designed the chassis so that the mounts on one side are hinged so the whole chassis can swing open to reveal the passive component side. The "computer lights" tuning indicator is also a very cool touch. They basically had one light per tuner position and a big rotary switch to activate them. I've only seen that type of channel indication once in tube era gear and that was in a Conrac rack-mount TV tuner (designed to tune OTA and spit out audio and video for a monitor). It was working fine on the original caps, but I decided that while I had the entire chassis out for the CRT swap I may as well change all those blue tubular caps, the tubular lytics, and the doubler lytics as preventative maintenance. The original CRT was dated 13th week of '64 so this was probably among the last VHF only PB roundys made before the IIRC June 1964 UHF mandate. Enjoy some more pictures and a link to even more pics.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/137849...h/41128762895/