Quote:
Originally Posted by vts1134
The following letter from Michael Bennett-Levy is posted on the Early Television Foundtation's website. It talks directly to the topic at hand.
Pre- war tubes - especially the small ones suffer quite quickly from ion burn and replacement tubes are not plentiful to put it mildly. A set may work today with an acceptable brightness but then the set is 'only' sixty something years old and has probably not been used for fifty or more of them. What about when you and I are dead in another hundred years? What will be the historical importance of a pre-war TV set with many components changed and a burned out tube? Just as a piece of furniture design?
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I bought my 1937 mirror lid set 35 years ago and whilst I've maintained it in working order for most of that time I have tended not to operate more than about once or twice a year and then for probably less than one hour at a time so I think that further deterioration of its 12" CRT over the next 100 years is unlikely to be very noticeable if its future owners treat it likewise.
It does exhibit some ion burn but you wouldn't notice it with the set switched off. As to components, it had quite a few 1940/50s replacements when I bought it and I've tried to replace these with genuine 30s resistors of correct style and I created replica capacitors to replace the "modern" nasties. I have retained the original EHT transformer winding but used its core for my replacement transformer.
If I possessed an almost unrepaired/unrestored example I think I would not want to do anything to it but find a suitable museum for it to live in.
Peter