A few scarce tubes will indeed get very expensive. But honestly I think there is no way that 10BP4s will ever be rightfully called scarce. I bet the same day this particular tested tube sold for so much, several sets containing good 10BP4s got no bids and ended up in the dumpster somewhere. There are still far more vintage sets out there than there are collectors to buy them. CRT salvage from beat-up sets can be a good choice.

And to think that I passed on one at our local club auction that went for $5.00... with the yoke attached!

I paid $120 for a 10BP4 including a 12LP4 about 2 years ago.
The Ebayer who sold me a Zenith Porthole offered them to me
when I went to pick up the TV.
Still have them in case I have a future project.
I think CRTs will tend to trend upward in price with a lot of fluxuations
where there will be some great deals along with some outrageous prices.

Carl

...And I thought $39 was high, considering I used to get them done for $16.95 at Dunbar in West Los Angeles in the 80s (color tubes were $39.50). I know it's all about supply & demand, and obviously the supply was great when there was a CRT oven in the back of half of the small TV repair shops. And now by context, I guess they don't make that gun anymore, so it would have to be re-cathoded. That would explain the $300 for Hawkeye, although I hadn't personally used them.

There really isn't that much time & labor involved at all. I've personally rebuilt a 10BP4 under supervision at Dunbar, and it's about 20 minutes total labor, and the rest of the time is oven time and vacuum pulldown time. You hotwire a tiny hole in the side of the neck, let the air in, then use a hot snare wire to crack the neck and old gun off. Then you weld an extension onto the neck, and cut it to proper length, then weld the new gun onto the neck. Stick it in the oven and hook up the vacuum line, and at the end of the day, you pinch off the vacuum nipple, thread the base on, and watch TV! Of course that's if you're a seasoned pro, which I'm not... But I don't see why anyone couldn't be taught easily and quickly.


I guess I'm just getting old, and time is going by faster :thumbsdn:

Charles

What I really meant my time was time tying up the oven. You could probably only do a couple CRTs a day with a single oven.

Back in the late 70's early 80's we used to buy rebuilt color CRT's in the 30-40 dollar range all the time from Hurleys.
They weren't the best quality, the corners usually had some dead pixels from dirt that got in the tube during rebuilding but they worked.

Pick up a Roundy set at a yard sale for $5 (that was common then), throw in a $30 CRT and a few small tubes (usually all the 6GH8's @$1 each), clean the tuner and controls and sell it for $200, those were the days. :thmbsp:

Eric/Charles,

Any knowledge of Calvideo? I have a pair of their metal-cone 21's I'm afraid to look at due to storage time.

I have a couple of their tubes, one is a like new 10BP4 in an 8TS30, the other is a 12LP4 that's been rejuvenated I think.

Edit, just retested the 10BP4 and emissions and cutoff are great but it shows a little bit of G1 leakage, about 11 volts and the scale on the tester says about 5 is acceptable, I'm guessing it'll still work ok though, could be some conductivity in the base glue too.

I've heard of them, but never formed an opinion. In the Los Angeles area, we had two major rebuilders; Dunbar and Pacific Vacuum. There were also a few midsized rebuilders such as West Coast TV in Culver City (3 or 4 ovens), and MetroColor in San Gabriel (a dozen or more ovens). The only one still in business today, is MetroColor...... Same owners, but it's now a cat boarding hotel, and the ovens have been converted to cat cages! They sold all the rest of the CRT rebuilding stuff to a company in Mexico in the early 2000s. I got a few NOS military 21" roundie color tubes from them, which are great. HR19VGUP22, if I recall. The military was still using 21FJ-type tubes for certain special applications at least until then, if not still today, I guess.

Charles

Wow! Perhaps I should keep my RCA 8T-243, or at least the 10BP4! I was thinking about scrapping it and saving key parts for my much nicer looking and working TC-127. Really I would like to find someone in driving distance to take the 243 and finish restoring it. I'm just not a fan of "roundies" with rectangular masks and plain jane cabinets.

Which begs the question if there's still any potential for getting CRT's rebuilt in Mexico? I don't think they have a whole lot of internet access, so it may be a little difficult to research.

I've heard that there are plenty of CRT rebuilders down there, and in fact, Ronnie Richardson (co-owner of Dunbar), went down there as part of his sellout deal to set up and train the new owners. That, of course, was at least 15 or 20 years ago, but I bet there are still lots and lots of CRT TVs being used and fixed there. MetroColor's equipment was sold to Mexico much later, so if there were still upstart CRT rebuilders as late as the 2000s, it's a good sign. I remember being in Tijuana in the early 1980s, and basically there were 1940s-50s black & white sets in use still, and I didn't even see any color sets. Even in restaurants and tourist-type places. The tour bus company had a mid-50s Magnavox 17" consolette in the tourist lounge.

So I'd bet there are lots of 1980s-90s TVs being repaired on a daily basis, and thus the demand for cheap rebuilt tubes.

Charles

Like with most things in our hobby, the prices are going to be all over the place. After seeing a 10BP4 sell for $150 on ebay maybe 6 months ago I listed one of my spares, but could only garner about half that. These were the most common b/w crt, right? The majority of the ones I've had were, if not super strong, at least very useable. There are lots of 10" sets that aren't worth $100 as a complete package. I parted out a Raytheon with a rough cabinet-it was worth more in parts than as a complete set.

This hobby will change. At some point, way in the future, you won't have trouble getting $500 for a 10BP4. Way in the future, I said!

Well, I'm glad I scrounged up discarded 10" sets from the curb on trash day years ago for salvageable CRTs, and glad I picked up a few NOS 10BP4s at estate sales for a couple of bucks apiece (again, many years ago.) I was accused of being (and wondered if I wasn't actually) a little nuts for storing away such "common" tubes, but I like collecting this stuff and it just made me feel better to have them.

I feel a lot better about it now.

And it doesn't make sense to me that used tubes go for good money, but unrestorable (and even restorable) sets with a likely good 10BP4 inside can't elicit even a dollar bid sometimes at club auctions.

At our July club swapmeet, I heard that after I left someone who had been trying unsuccessfully to sell an ugly, never-going-to-be-worth-restoring set with a weak-but-useable 10BP4 in it, smashed the set and smashed the CRT into the dumpster when he left.