I've had a '83 system 3 Zenith in the metal cabinet, I currently have a '68 tube color Zenith in the metal cabinet, but I've never seen either that 4 tube hybrid chassis, the early flat ss chassis, or that more common fold down chromacolor II ss chassis in a metal cabinet, do they exist, has anyone ever seen one?

They (Table Models) were in metal cabinets. As I remember is was not until System 3 that Zenith dropped metal for their table model cabinets.

I saw one four tube hybrid 23" or 25" in a metal cabinet, I've had a few CCII's in the metal cabinet, and the picture on the Sams folder for the 25EC58 horizontal SS chassis is a metal cabinet set.

OK, I understand now, yes. If I had known better, in the store where I worked from March 1979 until January 1980, I could have bought, I think, about four of these 1954 GE color monitors, new in their original wooden crates:

http://earlytelevision.org/ge_4tm15.html

The bad thing is, I had already started collecting old TV sets then (the same store had an RCA 630TS in its back room that I still own), but I thought of color TV as "newer", and I was only interested in pre-1950 TV sets, so I didn't even bother with the GE monitors.

Long Live The Seventies
 

I would pick the early Seventies. Most TVs still had tubes, the Zeniths were at their peak in performance and all the sets I like from '40s Bakelite radios to Color roundies were readily available and parts could be obtained locally. AM radio was great to listen to and most people still knew what shortwave was. Most watches were still mechanical rather than quartz, music was good, TV programs were good. God I miss the Seventies. The two things I would really miss from this era are my cellphone and my laptop.