RCA CTC-15 estate sale find!

[Whirled One]

Y'know, all the yard sales and estate sales I've been to the past dozen years or so have yielded exactly zero round-tube color sets... until last weekend. I happened to be in the Twin Cites area for the Radio Daze show and decided to catch a few local estate sales while I was there. [How come I never find anything like this *locally*??]

I guess a CTC-15 might not be that exciting to most folks, but this one has remote control (with a 7-button ultrasonic remote), and it's in great cosmetic shape. Came with its original manual (including the separate one for the Wireless Wizard remote) and schematic too.

Unfortunately, I don't have any place to put it in my apartment for now, so I'll have to swap some stuff around first... :-/

I've poked around a bit inside but haven't powered it up yet. The original owner said that it doesn't work, but he had forgotten just what was wrong with it. I have tested the CRT, and it's weak, but should be usable. It was reading pretty weak to begin with, but started to really perk up when I slowly raised the heater voltage to 7 volts, so perhaps it just needs to be run for a little while to "wake" up the cathode. Hopefully I'll get a chance to soft-start the set this weekend and see what's what.

One thing that occurred to me afterwards was-- could this be the same model as the CTC-15-looking set featured in the Michael Nesmith video of "Tonite" from _Elephant Parts_..? Well, I took a look, and as you can see, it's close but not quite. I forgot that the one in "Tonite" has a wider cabinet. They do seem to have the same speaker grille cloth at least. Also, as you can see, Michael Nesmith's TV has the "Living 3-D" feature not included on most CTC-15's.

[polaraman]

Sweet! I have the same set minus the UHF and remote control. I have yet to get to restore mine. A real good find with the remote control.

polaraman

[truetone36]

Nice!! I have the wide cabinet version in maple with dummy drawer pulls. I
found mine in a alley a few months ago.

Dumont-First with the finest in television.

[Whirled One]

Well, got a chance to check this thing over a bit this morning..! Looks like it's actually pretty healthy overall. It produces a properly sized raster with no appreciable blooming, colors look somewhere near okay, and sound is great. The main problem is that the focus is waaay off, and adjusting the focus coil doesn't seem to have any effect. I'd suspect there's no focus voltage, but I didn't have an HV meter with me. The slug screw for the focus coil is kinda messed up, but I tend to suspect that might have been the result of the previous owner trying to adjust it as a result of the focus being out, rather than the actual original *cause* of the bad focus.

Also, while I can hear the set responding to pressing the remote buttons (clicking of relays and/or motor sounds), but apparently the motors are stalling or there are some mechanical coupling issues, since none of them actually succeed in turning their respective controls. I'll have to look at that later. Also, the UHF dial seems to be pretty much jammed/stuck at the bottom of the dial, so I'll have to look into that too. BTW, one kinda interesting thing is that it appears this set wasn't equipped with the UHF tuner from the factory; it's the correct RCA tuner, but apparently it was installed by the dealer afterwards, since there was an installation manual with the set for the optional "UHF Kit".