Fixing Zenith CCII Avante 25JC49

[drwatson32]

Hello! As a bit of an intro, I'm Ian in NE Ohio- local to the Zenith console tv that had been on eBay for several months. (eventually picking it up) https://www.ebay.com/itm/204588597529

I've never serviced a CRT before, but have restored a handful of tube radios and amps. Not quite the same high voltages, but I'm well acquainted with things that want to bite. I had decided that I'd like to find a Chromacolor II given their longevity, it might be the last CRT I'd ever need. (Truth be told, I built a Pixelmusic 3000 and also wanted a TV that looked the part, something neat to look at while playing music) https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2020-11-26...-parallax.html

I never found anything local to me after 5 months of daily checking classifieds, but had been eyeballing this Avante console on ebay, wondering if I'd be happy with a console and be able to figure it out if I made a lowball offer that was accepted. Seller was asking a crazy (to me) $299 for a non-working TV that was missing the remote and (this kills my soul) they sold the base separately to someone who messaged them, so I made a lowball $20 offer explaining why this was such a hard sell, took their $50 counter offer.

The description made mention of the TV flipping the breaker, so when I brought it home, I blew out all the dust and powered the TV up with 60v on my variac. Fortunately, this allowed the TV to stay running, and sure enough, the tripler was arcing to the chassis. Of course there doesn't seem to be any of this tripler available on the internet. For the time being, I dismounted the tripler, found the crack in it, filled it with epoxy, let that cure, slathered that in a coat of RTV silicone, let it cure, and brought the TV up to full power. No more lightning! Between waiting for things to cure, I went ahead and cleaned out all the front panel control pots with contact cleaner and followed with Deoxit F5. I also saw enough threads that said to do it as a matter of course, so I resoldered the long ceramic IC on the 9-89 video output module. (Side notes- the safety capacitor that is always mentioned with CCII tvs was already the replacement orange one, and yes, I shorted the CRT per all the guides out there before getting my hands in there)

To this ignorant mind, the TV seemed to be working pretty good, just vertical size, convergence, probably other things being pretty off. I ordered a set of Philmore trimmer tools off Amazon, they came, seem to be trash & sending back, 3D printed a tool in PETG that seems to fit & work fine.

That brings me to tonight- I was using said 3D printed tool to make some adjustments per the Sams manual (nabbed that free from Cleveland library) using 240p Suite on a Sega Genesis : P

HOWEVER, this being the reason I decided to finally get on here, and get a 'build thread' of sorts started- I've become aware of something in the high voltage area softly making a sizzling bacon sort of noise while running. I couldn't see any arc or corona activity, variac is reporting a constant 1amp draw @120v (I have a cool 50's one with gauges lol) I also can't detect any ozone odor. Any thoughts on this? Thanks for the time!