1954 Muntz ?

[bowlesj79]

I picked this up at a flea market but know hardly anything about it. Just looking for more info.

[Jeffhs]

Muntz televisions were made about as "bare bones" as possible, with only two video IF stages, an RF amplifier stage in the tuner just good enough to get by (Muntz did not believe in building such things as cascode tuners into their sets), and so on. These sets normally did not work well, unless a very good antenna was used or if the set was located in a very strong signal area. I had neighbors in my home town (33 miles from the Cleveland TV station towers) who owned a Muntz console TV, and had an outdoor antenna on the chimney. The set worked well enough for what was available on TV in Cleveland at the time ('50s-'60s) which was three channels (3, 5, 8), but the set was eventually replaced by, I believe, an all-channel TV late in the '60s.

My point is that Muntz was the Edsel of television in the 1950s. The set you are referring to, of course, will not work on today's TV standards without cable or, at very least, a DTV converter box, the latter if you want to watch the set using just an antenna. I saw a lot of rust and dust on the chassis, not to mention a pushed-in speaker grill (the fabric covering over said grill was torn as well) and the speaker itself missing its paper cone. This TV will need a lot of work to restore it to operating condition, meaning replacement of all wax paper capacitors including, of course, those in the power supply. Failure to replace all defective caps in the latter will result in almost certain damage to or destruction of the power transformer; if this goes bad for any reason, replacements could be very difficult to find.

Good luck.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by bowlesj79

I picked this up at a flea market but know hardly anything about it. Just looking for more info.

I have a Muntz similar to the one shown, 17a3 chassis. I got it as a freebee, as the CRT was necked. I located a like-new aluminized Rauland CRT and did 75% of the recapping. It actually works rather well with a DTV convertor or a DVD player with an RF output.
Mine is in very nice condition, complete except for the back cover.
The one shown, I wouldn't waste any time one, two far gone.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

Muntz televisions were made about as "bare bones" as possible, with only two video IF stages, an RF amplifier stage in the tuner just good enough to get by (Muntz did not believe in building such things as cascode tuners into their sets), and so on. These sets normally did not work well, unless a very good antenna was used or if the set was located in a very strong signal area. I had neighbors in my home town (33 miles from the Cleveland TV station towers) who owned a Muntz console TV, and had an outdoor antenna on the chimney. The set worked well enough for what was available on TV in Cleveland at the time ('50s-'60s) which was three channels (3, 5, 8), but the set was eventually replaced by, I believe, an all-channel TV late in the '60s.

My point is that Muntz was the Edsel of television in the 1950s. The set you are referring to, of course, will not work on today's TV standards without cable or, at very least, a DTV converter box, the latter if you want to watch the set using just an antenna. I saw a lot of rust and dust on the chassis, not to mention a pushed-in speaker grill (the fabric covering over said grill was torn as well) and the speaker itself missing its paper cone. This TV will need a lot of work to restore it to operating condition, meaning replacement of all wax paper capacitors including, of course, those in the power supply. Failure to replace all defective caps in the latter will result in almost certain damage to or destruction of the power transformer; if this goes bad for any reason, replacements could be very difficult to find.

Good luck.

They made about three years of that chassis in various versions. Some were 24 and 27 inch models. All those chassis had three stages of IF and the better models had a cascade tuner. It had very minimal AGC circuit and sync circuit and it had to have a strong sync separator and amp tube, otherwise they were unstable. The horizontal circuit is synchroguide. The chassis also used a line fuse, where even the better makes didn't have those.