Hey, I'm new here... Still gotta get the hang of handling pictures. Here's the set:
http://sicaproductions.com/images/trk_before.jpg

Neat-o set, classic early Moderne styling. That's pre-war isn't it?

Anthony

Aah, yes I also neglected to ID the set for you. It is an RCA TRK-12 from 1939. This is by far the most common of the remaining prewar sets but I feel very fortunate to have found one. The styling is classic industrial design of the era. There's lots of info available on the web about designer John Vassos if you're interested.

Vassos you say? Sounds Croatian to me, kinda like a certain Serbo-Croat we both admire. ;) :thmbsp:

Anthony

Time for me to add my stuff here
 

Hallicrafters 820

Andrea CVL-16

The picture is better than this shot shows.

Philco 50T1403

Hoffman 7M112B

Here's a shot of my latest projection set (#10).

It's an RCA 648PTK from 1947. I picked this up from the original owners' son, it was kept in the main house and looks like new, but not working. He told me that it was operating until the early 60's then got to expensive to keep getting it repaired. A new 5AZP4 CRT was installed in 1958.


Chuck

1948 Admiral Bakelite
 

So how many of these are there out there? I've counted three so far on this thread.

Mine gets sound, the cabinet is OK, but the set is unrestored. It's another project for another day, but I know the picture tube works.

I bought it a few months back at an antique show in New Harmony, Ind.

There are a fair number of them around, I have two of the single chassis models. These, is the several models built, are supposed to have the largest bakelike castings ever made for anything. I don't know if that is true are not. The earliest ones have a seperate power supply chassis in the bottom, does yours?
Marlin

Marlin:

My Admiral is a single chassis model--# 20x122

I haven't had much time to work on it as I've got a new old house in South St. Louis that needs more immediate attention.

However I did change out a few caps in the HV section. I was able to get a brief flicker of a picture until one of the other caps started dripping wax. There is hope!

Is there any particular product you'd recommend to polish Bakelite? I have no major problems, but I'd at least like to bring the shine back to it.

Is there an antique TV/radio club in this area that you know of? I have not found any.

There are a bajillion sites for polishing Bakelite:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i...shing+bakelite

I just don't have the time to review them all, but you can start with the above link. Word of caution, some (all?) Bakelite contains asbestos so keep abrasive polishing to a minimum or at least do it outdoors. A simple dust mask will NOT protect you, only one of those Darth Vader units with charcoal filters will help.

Anthony

Hey msepic, you are only 20 minutes from my place! I am in Fenton, about 2 miles from I-270. Check my web site for directions and give me a call and come by some time! 636-326-9096. http://www.studio4-17.com
Also the St. Louis radio club link is: http://blues.netscad.net/~joetausr/ARCH/
They are having there monthly meeting the second Tuesday 7 PM at the Kirkwood civic center, and the Fall swap meet and auction in October.
Marlin

I've come to the conclusion that the Admiral consolettes are fairly common out there. I've seen more of those models than anything else on the various sites that deal with vintage TV's. Mine is just now being brought back into working condition (I hope) by a local guy. It's the single chasis model also. I posted a similar question to yours about polishing up the bakelite and was advised to use Magnolia Glayzit. It's not cheap and I can only find it on line and they kill you on shipping. I won't buy any until I'm sure the set can indeed be fixed. It is NOT carried by Graybar Electric as one person advised. But hey, in the scheme of things it's not that much more money to add to the cost of getting the TV working again. I was told by a TV/Radio historian that Admiral was a pretty good brand back in those days and I think he said they were more popular than RCA's, so that's probably why there are so many of them out there still. They're supposed to deliver good picture quality when they are in optimum working condition. I'll spare everybody the redundancy of posting a picture of mine here. And I'm still looking for a way to rig a remote control for it. There are old VCR's out there that have volume controls on them, but they are pretty tough to find, and I think I'm dreaming as far as finding one with a switched outlet on the back, so I may end up improvising. Good luck with your set!

If you can find a cable box with remote control, you can have both remote volume AND a switched AC outlet; almost all remote control cable boxes have both features, as well as remote channel selection. Of course, if you hook up your set to cable through one of these set-top boxes, you can get the same features as well. If your TV can tune to channel 3 or 4 (as yours obviously does), it will work with a cable box, the fact that the set is over 50 years old notwithstanding.

As the last poster said, good luck with your set. Those older sets are in many if not most cases built and, once in peak condition, will work much better than today's black plastic "cube" sets coming off the assembly lines in Korea and other offshore locations. They just don't make them like your Admiral anymore.

BTW, I have had good results shining Bakelite cabinets with ordinary furniture polish, such as Endust. I polished the Bakelite cabinet of my Zenith H511Y radio with this spray polish a few months ago; looks great today.

I'll be darned. I learned something (two things, actually) today. First, I didn't realize, myself, that Bakelite contains asbestos. As well, I was not aware that ordinary dust masks are not effective against Bakelite/asbestos dust. I have seen those huge dual-filter gas masks you mention; they look like something straight out of a science-fiction movie or TV show, as you said, but they are effective against more types of toxic dust and fumes than garden-variety dust masks (the kind you can get in most hardware stores).

Hey Jeff,
Thanks for the cable box advice. I hope you can clear something up for me. I will be hooking my Admiral up to cable since I'm in an area where rooftop antennas provide only marginal reception. I'm under the impression that analog cable boxes like the one you describe won't work if I'm not subscribing to that kind of service, and I have digital cable now with two set-top boxes. Can I really use an analog box on the Admiral in this situation, and would any box I find at a thrift store work? I've seen a lot of them out there that look like the analog boxes I had before I went to digital. That for sure would be the ideal solution for me.

...

Thanks Andy, that makes total sense! I have two cable-ready TV's that work fine on the non-digital channels. I'll start checking for one of those old analog cable boxes and see if I can track one down that has volume control.

This thread has been quite for awhile, so here's a set I dragged home recently. It's a DuMont Manchu, and it's BIG.

I have additional pictures on my site at: http://www.myvintagetv.com/dumont_manchu.htm


Chuck

Recent addition
 

Philco swivel consolette

Foo! Man that thing is spooky lookin......I didn't know they have TV's back in the Victorian era :lmao: Went to your site and saw your mention of that chassis being used in the bar sets....think about it, at the time so few people could afford TV so what better thing to draw more customers into a bar than a TV? (besides free beer and naked broads I mean). I bet for a while larger bar TV's were big business for many of the TV makers.

Anthony

DuMont Manchu TV; bar TVs
 

[QUOTE=heathkit tv]....think about it, at the time so few people could afford TV so what better thing to draw more customers into a bar than a TV?
Anthony [\QUOTE]

Especially a big set like that DuMont. I hate to think how much that particular set sold for when it was new--probably a grand or more (in late-1940s dollars). My aunt had a Stromberg-Carlson b&w console in the early '50s, same cabinet style as the DuMont under discussion here but white. I also hate to think how much her set cost new--again, perhaps in the $300-400 range (it was TV only, no radio or phono).

You're right; in the late '40s few people could afford TV, and from what I hear the '50s weren't much better in that regard (at least until the small portables came on the market in the latter part of the decade). When my folks were married in the mid-'50s their first TV set was a used RCA 21" console, followed, IIRC, by a used Crosley Super V 21" console (both monochrome--heaven knows they couldn't afford color in those days, but then again, neither could most folks 50 years ago). The first new TV I can ever remember us having was a Silvertone all-channel 17" portable in the mid-'60s, and even that was b&w. For some reason, my folks never had a color TV--as I mentioned, all our sets were b&w. The first color set to grace the living room of our house (aside from an old Silvertone roundie I got from a neighbor in my hometown in 1970, which remained in the basement) was my grandmother's 1971 Silvertone 25" color console; she brought it with her when she moved into the house in 1972, after my dad married his second wife and we wound up moving to another town.

GE UHF translator
 

Chuck, I was browsing your site a few minutes ago and found a picture of a GE UHF translator (what was later known as a converter). Its design struck me as unique, if odd, in that the channel selector dial was not marked 14-17-25-35-46-56-72-83 (for example) as all later converters were, but this one had the channel frequencies marked on the dial (starting at 470 MHz and ending at 890--this was back in days when the UHF TV band was still 70 channels).

I ask you, who could remember (or even knew) the channel frequencies of the various UHF stations in any city (the few towns that had UHF TV in those days, such as Youngstown, Ohio, Fort Wayne and possibly Evansville, Indiana, et al.)? Continuous VHF TV tuners were difficult enough to adjust for proper pictures; at least their dials were marked 2-13 (with FM between channels 6 and 7 on most DuMont sets), so there was no guessing as to which channel your TV was tuned to. Why didn't GE mark the dial of their translator with the actual UHF channel numbers, rather than forcing people to remember channel frequencies which are generally known only to station engineers and some dyed-in-the-wool TV hobbyists? Ordinary viewers, after all, don't care about such things as the frequency range of, say, channel 14. Technically-savvy folks know that's 470-476 MHz, but those numbers mean nothing to the average viewer.

Later converters and continuous tuning dials on all-channel TVs were calibrated in channel numbers, which, IMO, made a lot more sense to the average viewer who has little or no knowledge of or interest in how a television set works. After all, most ordinary people don't know or care how radios work, let alone TV. The idea of sending sound over the airwaves is beyond the understanding of most folks outside electronics; how sending pictures (video to us AKers) over the air is possible is totally baffling to most people as well. I know people who don't care how their color TV picture looks, as long as it's there--even if there is no color at all, or if whatever color is there is totally wrong. These folks were the ones for whom today's completely automatic TVs, completely devoid of front-panel controls except for one row or column of pushbuttons and functions accessible only by means of onscreen menus, were made (I don't know that most people even realize these menus even exist). The menus are accessible via a menu button on the front panel or the remote, but I would guess most people don't fiddle with them--they just accept the default settings out of the box and say "whatever" if someone tries to explain the menus to them.

I also think it is a wonderful idea that all service controls on modern TVs, except for focus and, in some cases, the G2 level (as on my own RCA CTC185), are hidden in service menus, accessible only to service personnel who know the access codes to get to them. Many televisions were heavily damaged or even destroyed (or at least incurred damage which was expensive to repair, especially in the case of color sets) in the old days of potentiometer controls along the rear apron of the chassis when viewers would go turning them at random, often "just to see what happens." Small children are notorious for this kind of stunt, but curious adults have been known to do the same thing--as I said, often causing serious damage to the chassis or CRT, which in turn leads to costly repairs. Moving the service adjustments to hidden menus eliminates this problem; the fact that the focus and G2 controls are on the back of the set will not lead to nuisance service calls either, since these controls can be adjusted only by means of a special tool available only to service personnel.

Most televisions made in the last decade or so (even the cheap offshore brands with names no one ever heard of), and all current production sets, are about as close to tamperproof as one can get. There is almost no way an average viewer can damage a modern TV by fooling with the service controls (except in cases where a person guesses the access codes simply by the luck of the draw, but then again there's the code or button sequence required to access the menus in the first place, which is generally unknown to the average person, so even this is practically unheard of).

For most viewers, however, since the service menus are invisible and, in most ordinary cases, inaccessible to them, there is almost no chance of anyone but a qualified service person altering the settings of the service controls. This is a system which should have been in place (its analog equivalent, anyhow, later followed by digital of course) from the beginning; it would have saved TV repair personnel much time responding to nuisance service calls, necessitated by viewers having fiddled with rear-panel controls they had no business adjusting in the first place.

Hey msepic, just an update on my 1950 Admiral's resurrection. It's fixed and working and provides better resolution than you might expect from an early set. The only annoying thing is that it can't compensate for the different types of video that it has to process, like a live local newscast compared to an old film. The newscast will be in such high contrast that a lot of stuff just looks black, but change the channel to an old movie and the picture will be so washed out and lacking contrast that the re-trace lines are always there. It's a case of constantly adjusting which was pretty much what I remember with my family's first TV set in the early 50's. I've read that there are fixes for the re-trace lines (Admiral actually put out a service bulletin for it) but the set doesn't get enough use to warrant taking it back to the guy who fixed it just for that. This TV is in a guest room with old furniture but I knew if I didn't make it convenient to use that I'd get protests from my other half. Found a cable box to make it remote but it got fried after the first round of viewing. I'm wondering if it was cable company sabotage. Haven't found another to replace it so am using a VCR and have put the TV on an extension cord with an in-line switch by the bed since the VCR doesn't have a switched outlet. I just keep the volume at a medium level. Two things I've come to realize about a 10-inch round or "double D" screen: 1) It's pretty small for viewing from more than several feet away, and 2) anything that would appear in the corners of a rectangular screen is cut off--really only noticeable when there is verbiage on the screen or with those little "bugs" all the networks superimpose in the lower right corner. But it's a novelty to watch and after it's been on a while that familiar old smell of warmed up bakelite fills the room. I think you'll have fun with your set once you find the time to get it working.

...

Thanks Andy. If I need to take the set back to the fix-it guy I will ask him about installing the circuit you've described. I know I've seen mention of an Admiral document that provides instructions on how to do this so it shouldn't be a big deal. Right now it's more trouble than it's worth to pull the chassis just for this one issue but it's nice to know it's not a major undertaking to fix when and if the time comes for some other repair.

DC Restoration
 

HI Andy,

Maybe you have some more ideas on the DC restoration in old sets. All the stuff I grew up with, with the exceptiion of Color sutff, had no DC restoration. I assumed they thought they were saving money, or that maybe they thought people didn't like blacked-out scenes. But then when you go back a little further in time, a lot of the really old (1949 and back) sets did have DC restoration, and either RF HV or flyback HV. Because they had DC restoration they didn't need any H or V retrace blanking ckts. But the problem they did have was raster blooming, since they had no HV regulators. Thus on bright scenes the raster would enlarge due to the falling anode voltage. No DC resoration took care of this problem since the average scene illumination was alway the same, and thus the anode current was a constant after the video coupling capacitors settled from scene to scene. But it was necessary to add retrace blanking since the picture black level was all over the place. I am guess this is the reasoning that went on with the mfr's. What do you think?

The problem might be lack of DC restoration, but I would also suspect a lack of video AGC (Automatic Gain Control) on that set. Many/most TVs from that era either had no AGC, or a less-functional form sometimes referred to as "simplified" AGC. [I'm not sure when improved, "keyed", AGC was introduced.] The result is that the contrast level will change as the signal level changes (i.e. as you switch channels or adjust the antenna). If your set does have at least some form of AGC, there should be an adjustment for it on the back of the set somewhere; that might help a little bit, but don't expect it to be perfect.

In any case, if the problem is poor/no AGC, then you'll see the contrast change dramatically if you adjust the antenna or move it around.

An easy way to tell if a TV doesn't have DC restoration is to see what happens during fade-ins/fade-outs between scenes in a show, or any program material that has large areas of solid black or solid white with some other motion (for instance, a white credit scroll/crawl on a black background). If fade-outs fade to a mid-grey instead of black, or white-on-black titles end up looking like white-on-grey (with the background grey level constantly changing as the amount of white text on the screen changes), or black segments between commercials turn grey instead, then you don't have DC restoration. Most TVs made in the mid-50's through the early/mid-60's don't have DC restoration, but a lot of older sets did.

BTW, regarding that GE UHF converter calibrated in MHz rather than channel numbers: I actually have one of those too, and I don't know why GE decided to calibrated the dial like that either. :) Then again, the FCC way-back-when actually assigned "channel numbers" for all the assignable frequencies on the FM broadcast band (didn't the numbers start with 200..?), but I don't think very many FM radios ever actually had those channel numbers marked on the dial. Did any FM radio stations ever actually announce their channel number duing station IDs rather than their broadcast frequency?

Andy, thanks for all the great info on DC restoration. There's a 1951 Capehart model 325F over at my parents' place that has been retired since 1962 except for a brief period around 1970 when I had the picture tube replaced, but it needed more than that, as everbody looked like a conehead on it, and this was a good 5 years before NBC Saturday Night came up with the concept! I recently checked the owners manual for it and it does have AGC so now I'm tempted to get this one recapped. Trouble is, I have no place to put it. It also needs the on/off and channel knobs so I will need to find exact replacements for those before bothering to have any chassis work done. Thanks again for sharing all of your knowledge with us on this subject.

Here is a set that I used to have. This is a 1951 Zenith H2250R 12" porthole. The set was a basket case when I bought it. I have a webpage up showing the restoration: http://www.angelfire.com/electronic2...R/porthole.htm
I ended up selling it when I bought a 1950 G2350. You can browse around my page and find another page on the restoration of that set.

I finally bought a real digital camera. Here is a screen shot of my Philco 50T1403. I need to experiment with lighting and such. But I finally got a useable screen shot...

I can't speak for other stations elsewhere in the country, but I do seem to remember a station in Cleveland that used to announce both its frequency in MHz and the FM channel number at the top of each hour, during the FCC-required station ID. This was an NBC-owned and operated station (WKYC-FM); it used this particular automated station ID at the top and bottom of every hour ("This is WKYC-FM, 105.7 megahertz, channel 289, Cleveland, Ohio"), when the network's own programming would pause for commercials and local affiliates' identifications. Also, another Cleveland station would announce both when signing off for the night (this was in the '60s-'70s, when FM and some AM stations would go off the air for maintenance late Sunday nights or early Monday mornings).

Yes, the FM broadcast band began with channel 201, IIRC, and ended with 300, 201 being 88.1 MHz and 300 being 107.9 MHz.

There were some very early American FM radios which had the FM channel numbers listed below the frequencies in MHz; in fact, there were even a few very old FM receivers which had their dials calibrated only in channel numbers. Some European FM sets, like Grundigs and others, marked their dials in frequency and channel numbers for years, until everything went digital.

Projection TV
 

As this is the Early B&W and Projection TV forum, here is my RCA TLS-86 "Television Receiver / Projector System" Circa. 1948. This unit was adapted from the RCA model 648PTk, according to the RCA Instruction Booklet. The unit is designed to project up to a 6'X8' image. The photos show the unit operating with a NOS 5TP4 CRT. Sorry, I did not have the unit quite focused properly when taking the photo.

There's one of these sitting in a local Junque Shop. It's been on display in the window for several years now, I've given up on them ever selling it.

I was looking for more info on the Web about this set and found this interesting item:

http://www.terramedia.co.uk/cinema-t...levision_2.htm

Eric,

You need to throw more money at them.
:D

Chuck

Hey guys, the base of that thing is the base for the RCA record cutting lathe. Guess it made sense as transcription records were being phased out and I bet they had a bunch of them around the factory.
Marlin

Just wait around a little while...sooner or later the shop will most likely close down or at least be hurting for money and will give you a fair deal to make some cash. I have seen things sit around shops for YEARS, like 5 years or more, and when it's been there that long, the shop will usually come to their senses that YOU are the only real hope of making any money on the item, and will deal with you.

That projector is awesome, I bet it eats CRTs for lunch ! Modern units are rated 10k hours so with 40's technology I wonder what that one gets, 5k ? Whats the HV on it ? You can probably check for broken bones with its xray output heh. I didn't know anybody had a working one, I saw some original photos of one on a TV site a few days ago.

Now you just need to get 2 more, some color filters and a demodulator for the worlds largest color projector :)