Little white Sears 9" SS color set

[AiboPet]

Sorry....posting this from work, so don't have the actual model handy.

Bought a little 9" solid state set from ebay. It's likely from the late 70s....white cabinet (plastic of course) and pretty generic looking. Powers right up and has an okay picture with just some very mild convergence to clean up. This is actually the BIGGEST set in my collection since I collect "micro" TV sets. I got this thing for REAL cheap though (like ten bucks...was like 15 to ship it).

I'll post some pics later

It has an odd problem though, and have pulled a part off the CRT board that puzzled me...which I will also post a pic of later.

The set came up fine (I did use a Variac, even for a SS set..just to be safe) but almost IMMEDIATELY there was arching....and I could see it when looking down through the back of the set. I could pretty much see it was either coming from the CRT socket or the board itself back there. I took the back off and brought the set up again and was immediately greeted by this same arching, but I could SEE it this time.

On either side of the CRT board, are what look like VERY large ceramic disk capacitors (about the size of a quarter). The weird thing about these though, is they look to be purposely "open" at the bottom. You see the regular beige ceramic coating around the top 3/4 of the disk...but the last 1/4 or so is "bare" and you can see part of a silver metallic component inside it. I thought something was "wrong" with this part...but the same part appears to be on both sides of the CRT board.

The arching.....is coming from one of those. At first it was "from that piece to ground", but it stopped when I bent the component over to be further from the PC board (I widened the air gap to ground by twisting this part to not stand straight up). I then noticed I could watch the set WITHOUT the snapping.....but I would still get a snap about once every ten minutes or so. It still comes from this one component.

Now the dumb part.

I decided to REMOVE the little ceramic disk. First, to get a better look at what it was....and to see if the set was at all affected by it missing.

The set comes on just FINE without it, and didn't seem to change anything. it ALSO didn't change the "occasional snap" about every ten minutes to ground.

I will post a pic of the little part later...but suspect most of you have seen one before. My guess is it is a ceramic capacitor, but I never seen that weird "naked on bottom" part.

I will look later to see if the focus pin on the socket looks okay...since all I can think of that would arch like 1/4" to ground would be focus? I'm also gonna take a good look to see the shield around the CRT is properly grounded. I was thinking maybe the HV is building up around it and somehow discharging through the neck board...if it isn't the focus doing this. Can I safely run the set without the HV connected to the CRT so I can see if it's still snapping?

As I mentioned earlier...aside from some touching up to be done with convergence I can see, the set sounds, tunes...and has a decent little 9" color picture. I did notice that when I would hear this snap, the picture would go white for like a quarter second.

I do not have a CRT checker (yet), but I don't SEE anything in the picture that would indicate any problem with it's CRT. The set really looks to have had a VERY easy life. It was little more than just dusty inside.