[Jeffhs]

Bob, when I saw the picture of your Admiral TV in the first post of this thread, it reminded me of a 21" Admiral table model TV I had in the early 1970s. It was a trash find in my old neighborhood near Cleveland (much closer to the city than where I live now), and was in a white cabinet with the controls (volume, channel selector, vert. hold, et al.) under a trap door at the top of said cabinet. The set worked amazingly well for its age (since it did not have a UHF tuner, I would place it some time before 1964) with its original tubes, CRT (no brightener) and caps. (Bear in mind, this was decades before Videokarma and long before I knew that all old TVs made before about 1967 need to be recapped.) Unfortunately, I had to junk that set when I moved in 1972 (long story and OT); needless to say, I hated to part with it, especially since it seemed to be working so well. The only other TV I had at the time that worked better than the Admiral was a Zenith K-2739 23" console, which I also had to get rid of when I moved.

I'm glad your Admiral TV is working as well as it is. Hook it up to a DTV converter box and an antenna (or cable) and you should get an excellent picture; those old TVs were built to a level of quality we will never see again.

I noticed, however, in one of the pictures of your set's chassis, that two tubes, the horizontal output and the LV rectifier, were glowing much, much brighter than they should have, and I also did not realize the CRT in your set was so weak until I read the post a second time. Are those tubes glowing normally, or is one of them shorted? In my years of fiddling with electronics, I have only seen one tube glowing that brightly; that was in a Zenith radio I plan to restore one of these days. The pilot light had burned out, and was putting so much of a strain on the 35W4 rectifier tube that it was causing said tube to glow extremely brightly. Had I not shut the radio off immediately after noticing this, the heavy overload would have destroyed the tube in no time flat.