New Year's Day Haul

[bgadow]

January 1st was a good day. It all started many months ago, when colortrakker posted that he had a Portacolor in need of some TLC, looking for a home. I had hoped to be in his neighborhood a month or so ago but it took until now to get up to Allentown. We had a great talk-good people find their way to AK! Anyway, the Portacolor turns out to be the exact model I bought earlier this year. Maybe that will make it easier to fix! A clean one, anyhow. (1974 model, I think)
Now, its not that I don't think a Portacolor is worth a 3-hour drive, but I really did want to find something else to do on the trip. Before Christmas I said, what the heck, lets do an ebay search-wouldn't it be funny if something in PA turned up that I could pick up on the same trip? So I do my usual search for "antique television" (I never buy anything-just look to pass time) and guess what is first on the list, with 18 hours left, no bids, opening at $1? An RCA color roundie! Next day, it was mine. The seller said she had tried to get rid of it several times but nobody would ever show up. I gave her $15 because I thought that was fair, considering what she had to go through.

I knew from her description that the set was not working. I wasn't home long, of course, before I started digging in to it. Problem #1, one of my favorites! Bad power switch. Of course it didn't work! While doing the soft-start I pulled the horiz. output & it didn't look so healthy so in went a NOS tube. With the full power-up I got a raster, but no focus. A new 1V2 solved that. With some tinkering I got barber poling; a new 6GH8 cured that. The color is off but I think it will come around. Now I have to do the cataract surgery, the first time I have really done this. (I don't count the crt in my CTC-15 as it really did fall off when I untaped it) The local tv repairman just gave me a tube caddy full of NOS controls/switches, so maybe there will be a new switch in there. I almost forgot, this is a CTC-12. Notice how similiar it is to Cory's Silvertone...maybe the biggest difference in the layout is mine has a smoke lens over the VHF dial instead of a clear window. The set is pretty dusty inside & has not seen a new tube in a long time. The crt is an RCA, can't say for sure if its the original. Not the strongest I've seen but not bad.

[drh4683]

Nice TVs! CRT surgery is pretty easy on the rca sets if you have a heat gun.
I bet all those 6GH8 tubes are shot! Put a life test on those 6GH8's and the meter will fall way in the the bad area of the scale. Change all of those gh8's on the chorma board and the set will have a nice picture im sure! Always use NOS gh8's as replacements. Swaping used 6gh8s never works or causes new problems.

[Sandy G]

Good show, Bryan ! Nice way to start out the New Year !-Sandy G.

[frenchy]

I have one of those Portacolors too, from pics I've seen, mine is one of the first run units ('66). Still works perfectly, I think maybe I changed 1 tube in it. People make fun of them as far as how the screen is pretty low-rez but for a little 9 or 10 inch screen it compares to new sets of the same screen size. And I garauntee none of these new ones will still be working in 38 years like this Portacolor. I still am a little amazed they were able to squeeze a 100% tube color set into that little unit....Frenchy

[bgadow]

Wanted to share the "finished" product. Things went very well. Actually, one of the biggest challenges was that long ago some dolt glued the volume control knob in place. And it was some good glue! I actually ended up pulling the shaft out "by its roots". Oh, well, the power switch was bad anyway. I had to destroy the old knob to get it off the shaft, but it was interferring with the fine tuning knob so this gave me an excuse to change to a smaller one. I didn't do much with the chassis while it was out besides vacuum it & replace a ceramic disc which had cracked in two. Almost all tubes appear to be original, with spring of '63 date codes. Counting the 3 or 4 replacements I put in there I guess 6 are newer. The CRT is original, I confirmed. The cataract surgery went well-just a little harder than I thought. It didn't loosen as quick as I imagined, but I had help-Mrs. Gadow worked the heat gun while I worked the perimeter with popsicle sticks. I was really surprised, once everything went back together and I switched it on nothing was out of tune! I like stability like that from a set. One of the oddities-the first I've ever seen,anyway, is the set has a glass color crystal (like a miniature tube). I had only seen the metal ones. Whats the story behind that? Is that OEM? Well, it works! A little tweaking of the color alignment brought the tint back around. It was thrown off, I think, earlier when I was using the screwdriver instead of a new tube to fix barberpolling. Convergence & purity went well. The worst remaining trouble is a mechanical problem with the UHF tuner. I'm going to have to pull it but for now I'm just using an old VCR. Another thing I thought was worth noting: my CTC-5, which I bought locally, is full of repair tags (imagine that, a CTC-5 that needed repairs!) with an address of Elkins Park (Philadelphia). This set came from the basement of an old house just miles away in Philly. (about 2 hours from me)

I have really earned a lot of respect for these sets-the CTC-12/16 chassis is, from what I've seen, a real solid performer. Others have commented on the famous crisp picture of RCA color sets & this set does not disapoint me.

[Chad Hauris]

On a GE ctc-15 clone I have, there is the vacuum-tube type crystal. This would seem to be more resistant to contamination/damage than the metal type crystal.