"New" RCA TRK-12

[Captain Video]

WOW!!! WOW!!! WOW!!!

[oldtvnut]

That is the nicest tv I ever saw! I agree, hook it up to a variac, switch to tv and see what happens...
I know I would!

[vts1134]

Originally Posted by oldtvnut

That is the nicest tv I ever saw! I agree, hook it up to a variac, switch to tv and see what happens...
I know I would!

I tried that very thing when I got the set....I also couldn't resist! Sadly no raster and I didn't leave full voltage applied for long enough to troubleshoot.

[M3-SRT8]

So...what's the verdict? Are we going to restuff the caps and return them to their age-old positions? Get it working?

[Josef]

Originally Posted by M3-SRT8

So...what's the verdict? Are we going to restuff the caps and return them to their age-old positions? Get it working?

Definitely

Your TRK-12 deserves what can be done with a radio:

http://videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=269062

If your set would be NOS I'd leave it in it's original condition too. In your case you have the great opportunity to bring a really great and unique device back to live

[consoleguy67]

What a beautiful work of art!

[Samuel1981]

Outstanding! How were you alerted to the set?

[rld-tv01]

Great find. All the good sets are back east.

[IsthmusTV]

Simply amazing. I would love to hear the story about how it survived all those years in an abandoned department store!

[rca2000]

Originally Posted by rld-tv01

Great find. All the good sets are back east.

The Chicago area ALSO seems to hold a lot of good stuff...too !!

[Kamakiri]

Fantastic! Did you end up making the drive?

[ronl]

Wow, Wow,Wow to infinity-lol!

[Sandy G]

Wow.... You are TRULY "A LUCKY Dawg..." (grin)

[GKinTN]

WOW!

It would be very cool to get this set running with minimal component changes.

One thing you could try on the electrolytics is a reforming technique that has been circulating the vintage guitar amp and audio world for several years now. This link describes the technique, but the jist of it is you add a 2 watt 100k resistor right before the power supply caps (basically in series with the B+) and then measure the voltage drop across this resistor. Some caps may only take a half hour to reform, some may take a day, and some may simply not be savable. That said, this should also be also be used along with a variac for safety, but with the inline resistor trick your caps (if savable) can be reformed in a self regulating manor. In this case you would remove all the tubes (I'd suggest a plug in solid state tube rectifier replacement for the power up) and keep the main AC down a bit with the variac since the power supply may go a bit higher than normal without the tubes in the circuit. You don't want to exceed the voltage rating of the caps! Anyway it's a cool trick and as I mentioned self regulating, as opposed to slowly working up a variac over time which is still a guessing game.

http://forum.metroamp.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8396

[old_coot88]

That's a neat idea for equipment in which there's no ohmic load on the B+ supply with all the tubes removed.
But in TVs of this vintage, there's often bleeder/divider resistors of less than 20K across the B+.
With the forming voltage supplied through a 100K resistor, the caps would never see but a fraction of their rated voltage.