CTC-4 Director 21

[SwizzyMan]

just picked up this nice CTC-4 director down in West Palm. The set has a big history and has been heavily modified. This set originally came from Connecticut. It was acquired by its previous owner (he was a repairman) when a customer decided that the set was too expensive to get repaired and they left it. It eventually moved down here to Florida. The previous owner was an experienced Ham radio operator. I was invited to take a look around his house while we were picking the set up, his house was full of receivers and a couple FM transmitters he built himself with many other pieces of tube equipment. I originally heard about this set through my wanted ad in the classifieds here. The original price was $6000 BIN and $3000 to bid on it. Eventually, it made its way to $500 after I offered $500 for it. The first thing that I noticed when i saw it on ebay was that it had a glass 21FBP22 instead of the original 21AXP22 crt. This didnt bother me much at all. While it may decrease its value, the FB will have a much better chance of surviving all these years without leaking. I was able to test the CRT today and the results were a bit discouraging, the cutoff on almost all the guns was just barely under the box on my CR-31A, and to make matters even more confusing each gun tested fine for a few seconds on the tester, but then the needle starts swinging erratically and upward. I thought I read somewhere that these results may indicate a gassy tube, but this doesnt make any sense since I can get a full raster, but the tube seems kind of dim and the red color seems to the least bright of the three colors. I'm not sure if I should zap the three guns with a rejuve or what. I ran the set for about five minutes monitoring the current draw just so I could get a baseline. I got a decent black and white picture, but when I turned the color on I got a lot of interference in the form of small streaking horizontal lines. I also noticed the colors are pretty rough with no signs of light blue and pretty dim reds. At the end of the five minute run I heard a loud pop (sounded like a firecracker).Current draw stayed fine. I immediately shut the set down. I think a paper cap finally gave out causing the loud pop. This is going to be a long project , but I think I can handle it.