New Zealand made TV sets
 

Hi all, mainly come here to read about everyones TV stories and restoration projects and thought I'd post up some of my sets. These were all made in New Zealand.
The first lot of photos are my current project which is a 1964 Majestic 23 inch black and white. Its a 'work in progress', main problem being the line discriminator sync diodes were leaky giving poor horizontal sync and lack of vertical height caused by a weak valve. Some other valves in the video section have been replaced also, and theres still come caps/resistors to change. It gives a better picture now that it did originally and luckily the crt is ok.

The rest of the photos are just other sets in my collection all Philips and Pye black and whites, all 1960's.
Photo 4 in the next thread is and early colour set made by Philips circa 1974.

Enjoy. :)

Glen

And here are the rest of the photos from the previous post...

Wow! Thanks for posting, These are cool looking sets :thmbsp: That flip out chassis looks like it would be easy to work on.

Were the CRTs made in New Zealand also? I noticed one CRT manufactured in Beaverton Oregon.:yes:

jr

That's cool.. I like seeing vintage sets from exotic lands. :banana:

Hi, thanks for the comment. Most of the CRTs were made here as fas as I know. The set I'm currently working on, if thats symbol you can half see on the right hand side on the back of the tube thats actually the AWA symbol which is Australian, so that tube may have come from Australia,as both our TV systems are PAL and 625 line. :)

G.

Thanks! :) I like seeing exotic sets too! I have never seen a colour set with tubes in it or anything older than 1960 as thats when TV first got going here in NZ and we only got colour in 1974!!
I love those early roundies and your 50's and 60's colour sets, they look great. Would like to see some of them in the flesh someday:yes:

G

I really enjoy seeing the Australian and New Zealand sets. Very much like ours...and yet very different. I think the chassis mounting is interesting on that Majestic. Looks like on table models it would have wrapped around the crt but since they had room they let it sit down bottom. Neat.

The Philips color sets are interesting to me because the cabinet style looks old fashioned compared to the set it contains. Different tastes in different countries, I guess.

Who owned Majestic when that set was made? I've seen the name on some Grundig sets. It seemed to have gotten traded around a bit after the old Grigbsy-Grunow company collapsed in the 1930s. One of the retired TV shop owners I know told me that the first sets he sold (probably in '54) were Majestic brand. Not sure who made them here.

Hi Bryan,thanks for the comments. :)

Majestic was just a brand name that a company called Dominion TV and Radio in New Zealand used, which back then made tvs/radios/record players for the market. All of our brand names were probably borrowed from overseas sets. Some other brand names that were used on NZ TV's were Bell, Pye, Thorn, Ultimate, Dreco, Astor, Murphy, Fleetwood, Singer, Admiral, Lotus, Deep Image, Sanyo just to name a few, mostly taken from English brands.

G.

They had some really cool looking sets in New Zealand, they look like a pleasure to work on too. Thanks for sharing!

Dind't know that in New Zeeland they made tv sets. The design of "Majestic" resembles of that of the Romanian tv's from the late '60's and '70's.

I wouldn't have thought that NZ had a large enuff population base to support a native electronics industry, let alone one as extensive as yours appeared to be...I guess the isolation worked FOR you in that respect...Interesting.

I was thinking this same thing too. Were some of these TVs exported to, say, Australia or elsewhere? That would fatten up the market.

In Australia we had our own well developed electronics industry so New Zealand did not get much of a chance to export here. I expect most if not all of the colour TV sets on the New Zealand market were based on chassis designed overseas. Is this correct Glen?

Hi Andrew, you are correct there, going from my knowledge about NZ set designs bearing in mind I wasn't even alive when the first Tvs were being made here (I'm 34) most of our sets were copied from an overseas chassis, especially Philips which were copied from Dutch sets.

Sanyo was manufactured here under lisence from Sanyo in Japan and NEC I believe was too. Pye probably was copied from the UK, I know Thorn here definetly was, I remember an old TV tech telling me how he moved to NZ for a better life and to get away from the early solid state troublesome colour Thorn sets he was servicing in the UK and he got here and they followed him! The same sets that gave him grief were being copied and manfactured here in NZ!:yes: I laughed when he told me this. Poor fella:D
The early black and white set designs were probably home-grown but I'm not too sure about that.
We did have one brand that was based on a Philips kitset colour TV, these were named "Bell" and they were the most unreliable colour sets ever made in NZ. I had rescued many of these from the dumps mainly for the picture tubes as they fitted other models. I never managed to get one of these Bells going but heard stories from other TV techs about how the line output stage would burn up and catch fire, and if no one was around at the time, well you know the rest!!!:no::no:

But overall most of our TV's were pretty good and there are still a few out there happily chugging away.,....like in my rumpus room!:D

G.

Thanks for your info on the NZ brands Glen. I'm currently collecting information on early Australian colour TV brands and the chassis used and it is useful to have the NZ perspective given how close the two countries are.

The Philips K9 console is particularly interesting as the sliders move sideways whereas all the Australian sets had up and down sliders.

We had the same early Thorns here as well but they are extremely rare sets. I'm still trying to find a Thorn 4000 chassis for a set in my collection thats incomplete.

Your NZ Pye's are probably UK designed. It would be interesting to know which chassis was used. The Australian Pye's are unique as the chassis was designed here. It is one of only three brands that used an Australian designed chassis.

I was still seeing the Thorn 4000 chassis better known as the 4KA and marketed under the AWA & some Thorn badged sets in the late 80's & into the early 90's as not many service techs in my town I living in at the time didn't want to touch them as they were considered very unreliable.

A lot them the CRT's chopped out by this stage of the game & the thick film modules used in that chassis had a high failure rate & became NLA by this time.

I still have the training manual for this chassis I got & scanned if this is of any help if you should come across one of these chassis's.

Thinking about it now, I'm pretty sure our Pye's were designed here too, both b/w and colour sets.
Funny you should mention about the K9 slider controls, I did have an overseas K9 that had up/down sliders and it had a live chassis, where as our K9's were isolated, so it may have been an Australian set, and it gave a fantastic picture, I'm not sure what happened to that set, it was a long time ago :)

The Thorn 4000 series I have never heard of, we had the 9000 series here and they were also bit unreliable the CRT's always went bad. The chassis slid out on two rails and it had three boards which swung out/lifted up and it had that weird cyclops power supply/line stage setup. The larger sets had Toshiba CRTs and they did produce a pretty good picture, just that chassis let them down. I haven't seen a 9000 series set for quite some time, most of them will be long gone now.

G.

Daro - Thanks for the kind offer for a scan of the manual but that won't be necessary. I'm lucky to have a full set of manuals for this chassis. If you happen to find a chassis in your travels, I'd be very interested in having it.

Glen - The Thorn 4000 (4KA) proved so unreliable in Australia that AWA-Thorn started to use imported Mitsubishi chassis for all their TV's from around 1976 on. We missed out on the later English Thorn models.
The Australian Philips K9 had a earthed chassis with a isolated switchmode power supply. Your live chassis K9 must have been a European import.
Did your Pyes use T series chassis numbers? The last black and white sets here used a T27 chassis. The first colour chassis was the T29. It underwent some revisions for a couple of years and then Pye switched to using Philips chassis (KT2, KT3 and KL9) until they were shut down along with Kriesler around 1980/1981.

Here's another possible link to NZ and the Majestic brand. There's a lot of fascinating history behind all of this. In 1920's Canadian inventor Edward "Ted" Rogers, the owner of Rogers Vacuum Tube Company, developed the world's first alternating current radio tube. Rogers looked for additional investors and agreed to a merger with the Majestic Corporation of Chicago. The Canadian government approved the merger and granted Rogers a radio license for the broadcast band with call sign CFRB in early 1927. The new company with manufacturing headquarters in Toronto, Canada, was called Rogers Majestic Corporation Limited. Their main task was to mass produce the First Rogers Batteryless radio. The merger completed in 1928.

For us vintage TV collectors, it's worth noting that in 1931, the Canadian Government also granted Edward Rogers the first television broadcasting license in Canada.

Rogers passed away in 1939, at the age of 39. It's sad news and yet, think what more he may have accomplished if he had lived! Since Canada's constitution was not repatriated until 1981, prior to this Canada, a Commonwealth country, was officially a Dominion of Great Britain, the "Crown". Countries part of the Commonwealth also have special trade relationships. Canadian Business and Patent law would trace back to British Law; which, if I understand correctly, would make it possible for another dominion, like New Zealand, to license the Rogers or Majestic brand names. Although I'm sure of the legal implications, the appearance of these brands in NZ make sense given their relation ship with the Crown.

Hi Andrew, thats interesting about Pye as I had a look at some of my b/w service manuals and they are also using T suffixes for the chassis type, ie T18, T20, T25, T27 etc. I wonder if they are the same as your versions?
Our colour Pye sets started from CT101,102,103 and so on. Some of the later Pyes like your ones also used the KT3/KL9 and even the Philips CTO chassis right up until the late 1980's so the Pye name must have carried on a bit longer here than in Australia...:)

G.

You could be right here, very interesting, thanks for posting this up :)

Here is a rather belated update on the Majestic set as mentioned in the first post in this thread, I actually finished the set electronically about a year ago! Don't know where that time has gone, having a two year old boy certainly makes you change your time management....:yes:

So to continue on where I left off....

It was a fairly straight forward process after I had replaced the crook sync discriminator diodes that were causing some problems with the horizontal side of things, I went through and replaced all the capacitors and replaced the filter/power supply caps and fitted some new rectifier diodes with 1N4007's.

Checked most of the resistors and replaced some that were a bit out, but the majority of them tested ok and still within tolerance which was good.
Also had to replace the vertical height and linearity pots as one had a dead spot and the other was open circuit and I seem to recall there was some other problem with the vertical section which needed fixing.

Tested all the valves and found a couple that were a bit off but all the others apart from the valves I had to replace initially checked ok. Adjusted picture geometry to best as possible.

So overall quite happy with way its been going and have been using it to watch DVD's mainly.

Although one night it gave me a scare, I watching something on it and started noticing the picture slowly getting larger.... then it started blooming followed by an arcing noise then it vanished! :yikes:

I jumped up and dived around the back thinking the worst like the line output transformer had just failed but luckily it was only the EY88 boost tube which had decided to go to air while in use, so another one in its place and we had a nice crisp stable picture again!

I've included some photos taken a couple of days ago of the finished result and a photo of the small pile of parts that were replaced. BTW the image shown is from an episode of UFO 1970's sci-fi series.

I learned recently from an old tv tech that the circuitry in this was based on a Philco?....Interesting :scratch2:

I don't often look in this forum .. sticking mainly to the early color set forum... but to see that K9 makes my heart go BUMP... the first K9s in OZ had rotary tuners and horizontal sliders.

I know because I had one ... the K9s were also rebranded as Kriesler in different cabinets.

I have the brochures still with the original K9 models. In fact is have a large collection of color tv brochures from 1975/76. (My avatar comes from a 1975 Philips brochure).

The K9's were a lovely chassis, I have several different models in varying operational condition. The Krieslers were not just a rebrand of Philips, they were a unique chassis based on the K9 but actually had quite a few changes made by Kriesler Engineers.

I'm actually in the process of researching the different TV models that were around in the 1975/76 period. I have managed to find a few old brochures but someone seems to want the ones that occaisonally turn up for sale a lot more than me. That wouldn't happen to be you by any chance?

I'm also near Melbourne. It would be nice to visit one day and compare notes.

Andrew mate ..no I have not been chasing brochures ..I have far too many as it is!!!

I have occasionally thought about scanning them but never thought anyone would be even slightly interested.

I collected at the time ... I have a series of wonderful Kreisler ones ..one that shows the full chassis....in a massive foldout brochure.

We should at least have a chat :) and I do need to find a home for my KV1800AS at some stage...

I'd be interested if you still have them as there isn't a real lot of anything on our early color TV's that were around at the time and in 2025 it will be 50 years since the commencement of color broadcasting in Australia.

Do you have any the sales brochures for the early PYE color TV's from 1975, the first brochures from PYE had a close up picture of a PYE TV on the front with simulated picture of an Olympic snow skier on the screen.

Seriously there is nothing out there in cyberspace, not even photographs of the T29, T30, T34 and T36 based PYE color television to be had anywhere. :'(

Our first color TV which we got in January of '75 was a PYE 22A3 using the T29 chassis which 11 years later I would cut my teeth repairing by the score when I entered the television repair trade myself.

Pye....yep
 

Daro,

Yes i HAD the Pye brochures....remember the Pye sets very well ....

I have given the brochures to a good mate from here... I am sure we can get them scanned for you somehow...

:)

chris

Sounds good to me. :D

I've got a lot of the old JR publications service manuals from the 1960's to about the mid 70's when color TV came out