Lost In The 50's

[RitchieMars]

Just to give you all a brief introduction of myself ( hard to be brief when you have such a tendency to be long-winded ) I am a 26-year-old musician who plays in a rockabilly duo called "Ritchie Mars & the Big Dipper." I'm what many people would probably call an "old soul." I'm a huge Buddy Holly fan, I collect vintage records, I love cars with fins, and pretty much everything that was cool about the 20th century... or well, the first half of it, anyways.

I ran across this forum while looking for information about my 195(4)? Zenith L1846R television set. I have a small collection of old radios, mainly Zeniths, which all work fine, although I rarely turn them on. They include an early 50's Zenith H274, a Zenith K731 from the early 60's?, and some little all-transistor type Zenith which has no visible model number. The only non-Zenith I own is an Admiral 4215-C7 which my great-grandmother gave me. It's from the early 40's, I believe. It's a big console with a 78-rpm record changer. It definitely needs work. But, most recently I acquired this Zenith television and while I really just wanted it as a nice piece of furniture, I rather like the idea of getting it to work like it's supposed to. So, I'm now beginning to dwell into all the information I can find about replacing capacitors and such.

Not that it's probably going to tell you much, but my Zenith will turn on and all the tubes glow. It doesn't get hot or act crazy, but the picture is very dim and at first all I got was a gray line across it. I also heard a soft crackle from the speakers once or twice, but past that no sound whatsoever. I hooked up a VCR to it a few days ago and put in "The Fighting Kentuckian." I did manage to get something of a picture... I could adjust the vertical height and the vertical and horizontal hold enough to make out John Wayne, but for the most part, everything was slanted, flying across the screen, and overlapping at the bottom as if the image were scrolling along a curved ribbon. Eventually I turned it off since an LSD trip wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I noticed that when I shut it off, I got a couple of blobs of light that swirled around before eventually fading away, rather than the single dot of light I had been seeing before when it was just the gray line. Huh... maybe I screwed it up worse?

Well, that's what's got me interested in this sort of thing and until I have some specifics on this television, I'm leaving it off and unplugged. I figure that even if I don't manage to fix this thing like I'm wanting, I'll at least learn enough to work on my other radios. It would be nice to get that old Admiral running again...