A rare site, an RCA CTC17x that's never had the tuner soldered

[radiotvnut]

The other day, a lady at a local church contacted me on Facebook and offered me 4 TVs for free that didn't sell in their last rummage sale. The sets were a 20" RCA CTC176 from 1996, a 25" Sanyo from 2003, a 19" Sanyo from 1998, and a 19" Samsung from 2000.

All worked, but I decided to open them and so some preventative maintenance. On the two Sanyo sets, I replaced a few capacitors that were known to give trouble and re-soldered some things.

I did the same thing to the Samsung and as I was putting it back together, I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing, the HV lead got tangled up on the convergence rings, I slid the chassis in too forcefully, and the board cracked around the flyback transformer. I'm trying to decide it I want to bother with it or salvage it for parts (I believe the tube will fit in that Zenith I got a couple of weeks ago).

Last, we have the RCA. It worked, but tapping on the tuner shield made it act up. So, I opened it and nobody has every soldered on it before. It looks like a low hours set, so I soldered the tuner ground connections, and it seems to be working fine.

The very first CTC177 I saw was an LXI-branded Sears set from 1992, and it was just out of warranty. I recall thinking, "what a piece of junk this is." After that, I fixed lots of tuner ground issues in those RCAs, but I don't know why it took them until the later run of the CTC203 to realize that maybe they should go back to a separate tuner. If it wasn't for those tuner issues, those CTC17x series sets would have been very reliable. I don't recall seeing very many bad tubes or flyback transformers in those sets.