The "cheap" TV's had a great picture too......

[drh4683]

I fixed up the '66 Airline console today and brought it back to life after sitting idle for over 30 years. After looking into it, for some reason the set has ALL original tubes on the chassis. However, its had its fair share of repairs back in the 60's. Its quite the economy TV for its time. First things first, the set had to be brought up slowly on a variac. Luckily all the lytics came back well. After initial power up, the audio was terrible and distorted caused by a leaky 5uf@25v lytic in the cathode of the 6BQ5 audio output. yes, a cheap TV that uses a 6BQ5, I was surprised too. A simple tuner cleaning helped greatly. The convergence was way off, the purity ring support disinigrated and the lateral magnet was missing, fell out of its metal frame. Luckily, I have a good supply of misc. rings and magnets for the old color sets. the CRT is basically like new. Its a "Wards Airline" crt EIA 337, made by westinghouse (!) which I was not aware that they produced CRTs. Only problem next to the audio was a rather dark picture caused by the video output tube. The 12BY7 needed to be replaced.
I was pleased to see the TV come back to life with a great color picture. The focus dialed in as good as you could hope for. This set probably cost somewhere around $250 new? Im amazed such a cheapy of a TV still survived in such nice shape, and the picture quality is as good as a zenith or RCA of the same time period.