Show us your vintage B&W sets!

[jshorva65]

Dear Rob,

Yes, this one set will pay most of the bills here for the month. I also received a phone call yesterday from someone in Oklahoma who will be paying to have his RCA 8-T-241 professionally packed, shipped to me, restored by me, re-packed and shipped back. Why? Because he has owned the set (in working order) for years until just recently when the tuner was damaged by a visiting grandchild. He removed the tuner and had it professionally rebuilt. He thinks he may have reinstalled it incorrectly since he reinstalled it himself and is not experienced with electronics. The set also was working with all of its original paper capacitors unreplaced when it worked. I plan to evaluate the condition of the set and either confirm or disprove the customer's suspicion that the paper capacitors may finally need replaced and then, if necessary, relace them. My own suspicion is that the rebuilt tuner, now properly aligned by the rebuilder, may be producing an IF for which the chassis is no longer properly aligned. Armed with sweep and marker generators and a frequency counter, I plan to do RF sweeps on each channel, verifying that the tuner is set up to produce the correct response curve, check the response curve of the IF amplifiers, and then likewise align the set's IF amplifiers back to factory specifications if my suspicions prove to be true.

Incidentally, I also kept my Crosley 9-408 for a second reason besides the fact that it is less common than the similar RCA 630TS. My Crosley set appears to have been kept in a climate-controlled environment for many years and cared for very well. Although both sets are complete and the finishes are almost equally nice on both the RCA 721TS and the Crosley 9-408, you'll notice that the Crosley's finish looks almost like it would have looked when it was new while the RCA's has dulled just slightly from age. The Crosley also works as well as it does and produces all the correct waveforms and response sweeps flawlessly without the need for replacement of even one of its original paper capacitors. The set is powered up weekly, always with a Variac, protected by a 2.5-amp fuse, displayed in a room that's climate-controlled between 65 and 85 degrees and never left unattended with power aqpplied. If any capacitor does eventually fail, I'll replace them all.

John