Just what I always wanted, an '85 Zenith console

[AiboPet]

Wow! What a crazy looking little tiny chassis inside a BIG box.

Almost like a portable...with a huge CRT. I guess it would be easy to work on though, and not run hot with all that space.

[radiotvnut]

I've had a few of those non-cable ready sets with the manual volume/power knob and there were also 13" and 19" versions of it. They even made 12" and 19" B&W's with that same style tuner. I ended up giving my set to the neighbor who helped me pick it up. Within 3 weeks of me giving it to him, his health took a severe nosedive and he had to be placed in a nursing home. After it was determined that he'd never live at home again, his legal guardian cleaned out the house and this TV fell back into my lap. After that, I gave it to someone else, never to be seen again.

[Kamakiri]

Weird thing is that it only draws 94 watts of power. Not used to seeing that on the back of a television

[sampson159]

had many of these in the 80s.not bad sets at all.nice crts and pretty cheap to repair.united tuner sold the chassis' for 59.00 back then.the replacements worked very well and never had one come back.didnt see too many bad crts either.

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by Kamakiri

Well, as luck would have it, I picked up a similar set last night at the curb. Yeah, what the hell, I felt sorry for it..I admit it. It was in such mint shape that I couldn't resist.

Of course, some scrapper cut the damn cord off but that was easy enough. Here's a lousy cell phone pic



It's a Zenith model Z2510PN3, date of manufacture was December 1983. Strange set, for a few reasons. First, I thought all '84 Zenith models switched over to green LEDs, I remembered '83 being the last year for the red display. Second, it's not "cable ready", and of course is not a remote set.

It's got those identical guts, and the vertical linearity is somewhat off, and the picture is a little too wide on the sides. I couldn't find any adjustment at all for either. Picture, however, is beautiful.....

Looks like my SY2585P, mine was made in December of 1982, has Space Command remote control and green LED display channel display.

[Kamakiri]

Was watching it the other day, and occasionally the color would develop something like a color sepia tone very briefly. Have to check to see if it's just a dirty control or something worse.....

[mpatoray]

I thought on Zeniths with LED displays, Green meant that they where cable ready and RED meant not cable ready. I remember a 90's non remote 13" color set we had with the Red LED's and not being cable ready.

[Kamakiri]

The only reason that I remember the red/green display thing is that my parents bought a new 19" Zenith color set in late '83, and the salesman said that the only big change for the '84 models was the green display versus red. But you know how salesmen lie , so who knows....

[Kamakiri]

Incidentally, after additional viewing, the issue seems to be that the blue gun is intermittently overdriven somehow. It's not a control issue, as the controls don't affect it. Going to have to pop the back off.....

[radiotvnut]

Try resoldering the resistor pack next to the three G2 controls on the main board. Otherwise, you may have an intermittently shorting CRT.

[Kamakiri]

Wiggling the controls, and trying to move them around physically had absolutely no effect on the picture, which surprised me. Even if it wasn't the controls themselves, I imagine it would have flexed the board to some degree to make or break the connection.

I think I'll just let the sucker play overnight first, and get up in the morning and see what it's doing. Since the problem's intermittent, I might not be able to easily spot it until it's failed completely.

[Jeffhs]

It's interesting that, by the '80s, these TVs used such a small chassis in huge console cabinets. I wonder why Zenith did this in the first place; after all, it seems like an awful waste of cabinet space. Putting that tiny chassis in a portable or table model would have made more sense. Was Zenith trying to make some kind of statement, or were they just seeing if they could make a console TV with as few parts as they thought they could get away with? That this TV did not have adjustments for raster size (the optimum values may have been set by fixed resistors) should have been a dead giveaway that corners had been cut in the design of the set -- well out of character for Zenith, which for decades -- generations, even -- was known for quality in radio as well as television and high fidelity.

I don't know when Zenith stopped using their slogan "the quality goes in before the name goes on", but I certainly think they wouldn't have had any business using it after the company left the US for Korea. My own variation on that slogan is "the quality fell off the boat on the way to Korea", which, IMHO, makes more sense these days.

BTW, just because these sets had postage stamp size chassis, don't think they were as light as feathers -- I'm sure they weren't. The CRT probably weighs 30 or more pounds, and the cabinet, though made of particle board, probably weighs at least as much as the tube, if not more. I have a utility cart here (made into an entertainment center cabinet) on which my flat-screen TV, VCR and DVD sit, and I'll bet the cart was made of particle board and could weigh 20-30 pounds or more, if it weighs an ounce. Just goes to prove my point -- that even today's furniture made of particle board or pressed sawdust (!) isn't light by any stretch of the imagination. Just don't try to lift a TV in a cabinet like that yourself, unless you want a hernia or worse.

[AiboPet]

Medium Density Fiber (MDF) is by NO means light anyway. The switch to this was purely a cost saving measure...since there really is no "grade" or attention paid to appearance. Put veneer on it, formica, or contact paper with PICTURES of wood...and be done with it. Most of my flat is stuff I got from IKEA or wherever.....That stuff is SUPER heavy, and almost ALL of it MDF.

I would imagine there has to be SOME actual real wood in these cabinets. MDF doesn't stand stress in any ONE location for very long without sagging. I would think they can't mount something like the CRT in an MDF panel. I used to build speaker boxes for high-end car stereo stuff (in the '80's)...and had to be careful of speaker mounting points for this reason if you mounted BIG speakers (I mean REALLY BIG)...and/or amps to the box itself.

My guess on the very small chassis was to save on an actual big metal chassis...and possibly to make this chassis VERY versatile as to where and what could be built around it. Since I have NEVER owned a big console like this....I have never really had the chance to work on any since the early '80s in school. I always dream of being in a place so big I could have one of those big LONG Curtis Mathis or Maggie consoles with the turntable and BIG 'ol paper speaker cones on each side, and the space AROUND me to not bug the neighbors if I wanna ENJOY that console :-)

[Kamakiri]

There is zero real wood on this set. The front of the cabinet, where the faux drawers are, is PLASTIC.

Sucker sure is heavy though. I carried it down into my basement myself. Wanna know how?

It was easy. I removed the wheels, put the set on its side, then took a piece of plywood, and using 6 drywall screws, affixed it to the bottom of the set. Then tipped it back up, and slid it across my living room carpet, and down my basement steps, without a scratch, and no straining of my back.

When you don't have a helper, you need to be inventive

[Kamakiri]

A better pic of the set....