Antonio,
looks like part of that is missing, I suspect the piece next to it that's screwed to the cabinet may have been part of the bracket that held it. Perhaps the Sam's folder for that set might have a picture of it.

Does that cylinder have a spring in it? It looks like brass so you could probably solder a new bracket to it. you could also just use a length of small chain in it's place, justs long enough to hold the radio door in the right position. That wouldn't be original but sometimes we have to make do :D

Eric

Check your local Lowes hardware store, they have a HUGE selection of strange hardware including loads of furniture bits. As far as chain stores go they have some really neat stuff unlike Home Despot.

Another possibility is to take a look at some of the hydraulic pistons that are used on modern cars trunks and hoods.

Anthony

Philco 50T-1400
 

The first old set I brought back to life, a few years ago. Has a scratchy audio that I need to trace but otherwise a reliable set.

(I have tried about 10 times but this photo just won't load-I'll try editing it again later with a new pic, maybe from work where my computer is a little faster)

Here is an early 50s Admiral-the cabinet (bakelite) doesn't show up much in this photo which is just as well as its pretty scratched up. Had this set for years with just one problem, multiple vertical pictures. Finally took a look at it one day and realized I had never recapped it, and it was packed tight with black beauties. The surprise was that the underside of the chassis is coated with rust. But, hey, it works! This is a metal/glass crt.

One more for tonight, this RCA 170PO42 that I just got running today. I've had this set long enough that I have no idea where it came from or what I gave for it! Pretty dirty set, inside & out, and I didn't hold out much hope for it. Finally found that a bad yoke was killing the hv. Thanks to Moyer here it is, alive again! I didn't think much of this set before, except that I liked the styling, but now I realize this is a cut above the competition, transformer powered, built pretty heavy.

Re: Philco 50T-1400
 

Bryan, I just gotta say that looks more like a Flashlight than TV :D


But seriously I think your picture got corrupted, can you re-upload it?

Eric

Here are two of my favorite sets. Neither is anything really special I guess but the Philco was my teenage room TV in the early 80s. I bought the Sparton from a guy at the flea market back then who used it as an everyday set until bringing it to the market to view. The strange thing is that both of these sets have been marvelous performers. The Philco went to the shop once in its heavy use days for distorted sound. The Sparton has never been worked on, at least in the last 20 years. They both remain watchable although the Philco came with a brightener and I believe it is catching up with the 21ZP4B. Best viewed with the lights off. I need the front plastic and small knobs for the Philco. Mine is damaged and missing 2 knobs. The Sparton is the more interesting and well built of the two. Double rectifiers, super reception, and extemely crisp, clear picture. Probably one of the best brands of the time. I think they are up there with Capehart and Dumont.

Ge 10t1
 

Today I drove across the state line to Lake Charles, LA to pick up this GE 10T1. The man had contacted me about it a while back in response to an ad I had put on our local online classified website.

He said he turned it on one day a few years back and POW! One of the filters blew. He started changing the caps out, but never got around to finishing. Before this incident, he said it put out a pretty impressive picture.

Also, in this deal, he threw in a bad full of electrolytics for it, extra tubes, and a spare 10BP4. I have checked the emissions of the spare tube and the one in the set... they both check out with excellent emissions!

That's not all... he also filled up my trunk with several binders of Sams and Riders. I think the Sams cover 1 thru 100. Not sure yet what the Riders cover. These Sams will be handy because I have many missing folders in my early ones.

All this for 80 bucks. Seemed like a fair price to me.

Charlie, great haul, and even greater car to haul in! Duster? 1975 or there a bouts? I had a '74 for years.
Marlin

72 Gold Duster with the 318. This car has hauled a few smaller sets, some CRT's from the old TV shop in town, and a few CRT's back and forth to Dallas to be rebuilt.

Charlie,

Isn't it a federal offense to transport a vintage tv across a state line?:uzi:

The law excludes those whom drive cool mopars!

How about a Truetone!

polaraman

How's the CRT in that Truetone...I have one of these exact sets, performance is good except CRT is weak.

What CRT is it? The markings on mine are gone. Really do not want to part out the set. Would like to test CRT though.

polaraman

Setchell Carlson
 

Here's one of my recent aquisitions via Captainmoody. This Setchell P-67 had a few burned up resistors that I was able to replace thanks to Charlie sending the Sam's info. Thanks Charlie T! The set still has a way to go even after 95% of caps and lytics have been changed. The picture is very unstable and the 17" CRT needs replacing. The CRT has good emmision but low cut-off so contrast is horrible. I've set this one aside so I can focus on my RCA 14PD8054.
Jim

Just started cleaning and taking apart this RCA 14PD8054. The TV is in working condition but needs work. Nice strong CRT but the images are distorted (Squished legs, stretched heads, etc...)
I'll slowly go through and replace the caps. Anyone know the proper replacements for the selenium rectifiers in this set? Of course I don't have the Sam's folder on this one. I'm hoping I can go to Radio Shack and buy diodes as replacements. Any help or tips on restoring this TV is much appreciated.
Jim

I'd replace those seleniums with silicon diodes ASAP, as you are planning to do. (Replacing those old electrolytic caps won't hurt, either--in fact, your TV will work much better with fresh ones. Many stubborn problems in older sets (sync, AGC, hum bars, etc.) can be directly traced to defective electrolytics.

Remember, however, to use resistors in series with the new diodes to maintain the proper output voltage, i. e. to get the same output from the silicons as you now read at the output of the selenium stacks.

Selenium rectifiers were good in their day, but that day is long gone. Seleniums can short, causing them to release a gas which smells like sulphur or rotten eggs (the smoke may be toxic as well), which could also create a fire hazard if the selenium actually burns. Depending entirely upon which way the AC plug is in the wall socket, seleniums can cause a shock hazard as well.

In view of all the problems these outdated parts can cause, I think you're doing the right thing by replacing your TV's seleniums with modern silicons. Any TV/radio technician will tell you the same thing.

I'm not a technician, but I was an electronics experimenter many years ago. About 30-35 years ago I had a basement full of old TVs, radios and even a couple old phonographs which I experimented with quite a bit, so I've had some experience with these older style power supplies and circuits; the new ones throw me for a loop because I haven't kept up with the technology, but I still enjoy helping these guys on AK with their problems (and reading about the ones I can't help them with). And I enjoy looking at the pics of the old TVs I see here no end. It keeps me close to a hobby I enjoyed for many years, until I moved to a small apartment about four years ago. I am also an amateur radio operator (got my first license in 1972 and just renewed the license last month or thereabouts); one must know one's way around electronics fairly well to pass the written test for the license (at least that's how it used to be when I first got into the hobby; it's much different today).

Good luck and very kind regards,

:yikes:
The type of rectifier used in a hot chassis TV set has nothing to do with the shock hazard. It is the connection of one side of the AC line directly to the chassis, without the isolation provided by a transformer, that causes the hazard.

While I agree that it is a good idea to replace selenium rectifiers with silicon diodes, a hot chassis set will be no safer in regards to shock hazard whether a silicon, selenium, or vacuum tube rectifier is used!

Those sets are a real pain to work on!

The P.C. board is covered with a metal shield that has to be removed in order to unsolder the caps. It's held on by several solder joints, you have to gently pry up on it while heating the joints one at a time till it pulls away. Don't pull too hard or heat it too much or you will pull the trace off the board!

IIRC the shield is also a ground point so it has to be put back to test the operation of the set so be sure to replace everything that needs to be replaced the first time :eek:

A 1 amp 600v piv diode will replace the Seleniums, as noted by jeffhs you may need to add a resistor to bring the B+ back down to normal.

I stand corrected. Thanks.

I learned most of what I know from the "oldtimers" around where I grew up. Back in the 70's, I suggested to one tech that a pair of selenium stacks should be replaced with silicon diodes. I learned something that day and also did a bit of teaching. He said those stacks might not fail for another 10 years or more and replacing them would raise the B+ enough to need some compensation. Flipping back to the first page of the Sams, he read off the 1.8A current rating of the set (an old 19" B/W portable of some kind, metal case, knobs on top) and said "2-amp slo-blo pigtail" which he then went and got from the parts cabinet along with a length of clear plastic tubing. Unsoldering one lead from the on/off switch, he moved that lead to a nearby unused tube socket pin, soldered one end of the fuse there also, covered the fuse with the plastic tubing and soldered the other end to the switch lug where he had removed the original connection. At the time, I was maybe 14 and until that day my hanging around at the shop was sort of a nuisance to the oldtimers. The tech I was observing that day had been working on radio sets since 1941 and was from the "old school" of "if it ain't broke ..." and he thanked me for reminding him that safety precautions were often neglected in older sets and that's one more thing that it's our job to fix. He retired maybe ten years later and was about 80 when he died at the retirement home where my ex works.

I talked with a veteran technician from out in Arizona yesterday about a Farnsworth 661P at the request of someone from Texas who asked for my recommendation of a restoration shop that was closer to his location than Ohio. The conversation with someone in his 80s about this old gear reminded me of my years as a student. He doesn't have Internet access and only seemed vaguely aware that younger generations were taking an interest in old technology. I, of course, told him about AK and that his local library probably had Net access and people who could show him how to reach us. I also told him about Steve's museum and the Convention just in case he and his wife, who had initially answered the phone, might want to do a bit of traveling this or next year. He shared a few interesting stories about the CRT rebuild shops that used to operate in his area and how "some knew what they were doing, and some didn't" and he backed that statement up with one anecdote about some workers leaving some tubes in the oven with the vacuum pump running during a break. When the workers got back to their posts, these picture tubes were totally useless for anything "except maybe an ashtray" ... having been crushed flat when the heat of the tube oven softened the glass enough that the structure of the tube buckled under the pressure of the atmosphere.

RCA 14PD8054
 

Thanks to all for the outstanding tips on restoring this RCA TV.
I just finished this one last night after hours of work. Eric you were right about this set being a pain to restore, I rate it right up there with the Holiday Predicta as a nightmare chassis to work on.
Someone in the past tack soldered a few caps on top of the board but I removed the bottom plate and installed "ALL" the caps properly. The set improved slowly as I re-capped the set (Including all electrolytics) But wasn't stable until I re-capped the board. Runs great now. The last thing I need to do is replace those Selenims, I tried the 1KV 600V diodes with resistors in series but they didn't work. I don't have the Sams for the proper voltage rating so I guessed with 300 ohm resistors no luck. The seleniums are behind the CRT so It's hard to get a probe back there to measure. The original seleniums are hooked up for now until I get the Sam's folder. I'll replace those seleniums for sure, I can take this set apart in my sleep now. Thanks again for all the help.
Jim

Jim,

That RCA turned out great! I love that screen shot with Ralph and Alice! The expression on his face looks like she just shot him down good! :uzi:

Yeah,
Ralph isn't impressed with Alice's woman's work is never done speech, His response "Good Gosh!"

"Pins and needles, needles and pins, a happy man is a man that grins."

Anthony

This my first B&W console. It needs all the tubes, including a new picture tube. The bakelite base is half missing and 2 of the 5 brittle wires are gone for ever. its ALSO missing the phono. I'd LOVE to have a chat with whom ever droped this set off at the dump! ARG

What picture tube do you need?

I'd use resistors around 5 to 10 ohms. It's a little hard to calculate the desired ohmage when working with a half wave rectifier with filter caps circuit. Most of the time the rectifier diode is not conducting. It does conduct for a brief period of time at the top of the AC waveform, to top off the filter cap. That makes for a relatively large current spike. This spike is about 20 times larger than the B+ current draw by the rest of the set from its power supply. A rough guess for that current would be around 200ma. Twenty times that comes out to 4 amps. and to lose 20V would mean a 5 ohm power resistor. 300 ohms aint gonna curt it

H2s04:

I think that is a 1953 set. We had the bakelite table top version as our first set when I was a kid. My dad replaced the CRT twice and I remember "helping" him. We used it as our main set until 1965 when we got our first color set. Hope you can get it running. If you can find a CRT, I'll donate whatever tubes I have to the cause.

Kamakiri: I'm in need of a 21wp4x

Tim: You're correct, FEB 1953 is rubber stamped on the yoke mount. Thanks alot for the tube offer, but a some people on another message board have already chipped in to help.

You can try and e-mail this guy: [email protected]
He posted over on the ETF site that he had a bunch of CRTs for sale including a 21WP4. Good luck.

RCA 14PD8054
 

You were right,
5 ohm / 5 watt resistors with the diodes work perfectly, The old seleniums are disconnected now. The current is 240ma according to the Sam's folder so the 5 ohm resistor is right on. Thanks again.
Jim

Latest finds....
 

Here I am, trying hard to get rid of tv's, and what do I do? Buy more! The story behind these: an elderly customer of mine has moved from his old farmhouse into an apartment. I mentioned that I collect radios/tv's. First he gave me an old Philco console radio from the barn. The story is that he never threw out any of the old stuff, just stashed it away somewhere. And thats where these came in-the old tv sets just got pushed upstairs when they stopped working. The one on the left is a Silvertone, 1954 model. The other is a 1960 Motorola. He says both have bad crts, something I usually take with a grain of salt. I tend to believe it on the Sears since it has a GE branded tube with a brightener, which would seem to point to years of hard use. Will have to put the tester on it-set is packed with black beauties so I know better than to even try it. The Motorola is loaded inside with tobacco gunk but has most of its original tubes, including HV. I carefully powered it up and I have audio but no hv, despite subbing all tubes in the circuit. Tommorow night I'll drag out my trusty Sencore sweep circuit troubleshooter and see what develops. Ironically, I just brought back to life a Motorola that is about a year older, a cheap table model. They are very similiar with the biggest difference being that the 59 is series filament and this one parallel. Last year I came across a collector who wanted to sell all his tvs and most of his radios. This included a Motorola console very close to this one. I walked on that deal because he hemmed and hawed on the price too much. Out of that whole lot this was the set I kept thinking I might want to call him on again-now I don't have to!

BTW, price on these was $15 each, which I, being a cheapskate, thought was too high. He said the cabinets were worth a lot...hmmm...sounds familiar?!

Hi Bryan,
I have the same Silvertone as the one in your picture. The only difference is that mine has doors on the front of it and has the factory built in UHF tuner that is integral with the VHF tuner shafts. It tunes thru the knob behind the VHF selector. The CRT in mine had went to air and with it being a metal cone tube i ended up converting it to an all glass CRT which works well. Mine was missing the back so i dont have a clue what model it is but its a nice playing set. Mine also has the phono switch on it like some of the RCA's of that era had and its switched behind the front cover plate. The cool thing about this one is that when you flip the switch to phono, it turns off everything but the audio in the tv so no looking at a snowy picture while playing records. Nice finds! I like the cool swivel legs on the Motorola! Very retro.
Tony

Most TVs of early '50s vintage with phono inputs were set up to shut off the video circuits, even to the point of blanking the raster, when the record player was in use. I've seen a few of these sets in over thirty years of electronics experimenting, and even owned one. The one I owned was a 16" 1951 b&w roundie Majestic; the phono-radio switch was on the front panel, smack-dab in between the volume/contrast control and the tuner. My folks' first TV was a 1954 RCA Victor console like polaraman's (ours had the speaker at the side of the cabinet and two decorative vertical metal bars at the base, where the speakers are in his set), also with a phono input (we also had the matching 45-EY-3 45-rpm record changer, which sat atop the TV of course).

Speaking of the 45-EY-3 changer, I had one when I was a kid (the model with an integrated amplifier; the volume control was on the right side of the case, IIRC). The thing got pitched when we moved in 1972, again IIRC. :(

I know now, 32 years later, I should have kept the unit for the antique value of it, but I was just a kid then (16 years old). Besides, we were in a hurry to move, so a lot of stuff went out with the trash--including my 45 changer and a basement full of old TVs (including the Majestic roundie). :eek: :( Hated to part with those sets, especially a 23" Zenith b&w console I had rescued from a neighbor's trash and retubed from the ground up about three years earlier (it had no tubes in it except the HV rectifier and CRT when I found it), but again, I had no choice. :(

Did they turn the heaters off along with the B+ to the TV only circuits? It'd be kind of a waste of power and tube life to leave them on. You'd need either a high current switch for the heater circuit or a separate heater transformer controlled by a lighter duty switch ganged with the TV/phono/radio function switch. If they did leave all the tube heaters running, you would have instant on of the TV once you were done playing records or the radio.....

I'm not sure by any means, but given the fact that only one switch was used in these sets as the TV/phono selector, and the TV came on immediately after switching back to TV mode from phono or radio, I would think all tube filaments remained on when the set was being used as a phono amplifier or when the radio tuner was on. However, the circuit was probably arranged to open the B+ lines to the video and RF tubes, leaving the filaments on, during such operation. The sets I've seen with phono inputs usually used a push-pull, rotary or slide switch on the front panel in this position. For TV/radio/phono, however, most if not all sets used a rotary switch on the audio control panel (I have never seen or even heard of any American-made 3-way console which used any other arrangement, including push button switches, for mode selection). The arrangement you mention, using either a separate high-current switch for the filaments ganged with the B+ switch or a separate switched filament supply for the RF and video tubes, would have been, IMO, unnecessarily complex and would have added a certain percentage more to the cost of the set, not to mention being wasteful of power, also as you mentioned.

I took a closer look at the Silvertone I have and it, too, has that switch. Seems like an odd place to put it. The Transvision I have is similiar in that you can tune it from tv to fm (or aircraft band) and the picture tube will come and go as you tune. (I forget how exactly its switched) That type of back/forth switch is kinda neat; its used on a Philco I have with factory UHF-turn the channel knob one way and you stay on VHF, turn it to the UHF setting then backwards and it switches bands. Kinda like switching an old car into overdrive!

Regarding the Silvertone,the cabinet is a natural for doors, mine looks like it has room for them, but no sign that it ever had them. That set is really oversized-the chassis is huge, especially compared to its contemperaries. The set is something like 27" square, not counting crt cap, and the chassis uses most of that floor space, plus is extra deep. Meanwhile, the Motorola has a chassis smaller than many old radios.

Most 3-way units had completely separate power supplies for the TV and radio/phono sections, especially separate-chassis arrangements like the RCA 730TV1 and 730TV2. The master on/off was usually part of the volume control or sometimes the tone control. The primary circuit of the power transformer on the audio chassis was connected so that the master on/off alone would control it. The TV chassis' power switch was ganged to the mode switch such that the tv power transformer primary was shunted across the audio power transformer's primary in television mode. Many radio/TV combo units left the heaters energized but switched the B+. Some compact and low-priced models merely cut the drive for the sweep circuits and biased the sweep output tubes to cutoff (thus killing HV and blanking the raster) such that the mode switch handled only grid-circuit currents, eliminating the need for high-current switch contacts. Certainly it was a waste of power and tube life, but it could be accomplished with cheap parts and the power company and service shops got plenty of business ... all those extra watthours and replacing weak tubes.

Here's my contribution. Got w-a-y too many sets after 20-some years of collecting and three moves, but here's a pic of the wretched centerpiece of my collection, in all it's "before" glory. I've had this set for 13 years and assumed I'd never get it done 'cause I'd never find a picture tube so it has just sat around.
Due to the extraordinarily kind assistance of Dave Johnson and Steve McVoy I now have a good 12AP4. The cabinet is currently undergoing restoration and if things go accoding to my usual thoughtful pace ("I think I'll have another beer instead of replacing those caps!"), I'll have the electronics done sometime within the next 13 years!