The twins
 

Just picked up two Stromberg Carlson 620's in really neat Chinese cabinets from a fellow member. Couldn't pass them up. One has a 621A chassis and one is a 622. Only different that I can see is UHF and a slightly different flyback. I've always thought these cabinets were really neat. A little gaudy but neat.

Bringing the last one into the TV room, I necked it!!!:pity: That whoosh is absolutely the worst sound. All the life being sucked out of your CRT in about 5 seconds. It was the set that was recapped too. Anyway, swapped the CRT's and we will see what we have. Anyone got a 21FP-4A?

Neat TV's. I kinda like them.

Carl

Aww, man ! That SUX !!

I have a like new, rebuilt 21FP4A. PM me. We sould be able to get together on it, regarding price and delivery.

Thanks. I'll let you know. It looks like I may have to part the 621. I was told the power switch was bad on the 622 (the recapped one), but I thought that it wouldn't power off. Turns out it won't power on.

Those are great looking sets. They use exactly the same panel in the center of the doors with the carving on it that Zenith used on their chinese cabinet color sets (painted differently) in 1965. I've always wondered how that happened, maybe Stromberg Carlson had some left over and Zenith bought them?

My aunt had a 23" Stromberg-Carlson b&w TV in a white Chinese cabinet (the carvings were on the door pulls, IIRC; the rest of the cabinet was solid white). I don't know if that set ever worked (I don't think it did, for long; she replaced it with an RCA Victor 17" portable some time in the sixties). She kept the SC TV in her living room for years, then when she moved across town in 1969, she finally got rid of it. Before she moved, however, she had the guts removed and she turned the white cabinet into a storage unit. :nono: I think she kept that cabinet when she moved, and kept it in a back room of her house until she moved again (job transfer) some ten years later.

How did you manage to knock the neck off your set's CRT? I would think that would be impossible with the back on, because of the CRT cap; you must have had the cover off when you were moving the TV -- that or else the CRT cap was missing.

You were fortunate to have had another set with an identical CRT to swap into the TV you just recapped. That also must have been a terrible feeling, having put all that work into the set only to accidentally neck the CRT. :no:

I'll be looking forward to seeing your next post regarding the 21FP4 you swapped into the set from the other one. If the replacement is identical or a recognized substitute, it should work.

Replacing a CRT with the same type as was originally in the set is always the best policy; in fact, Zenith put such a warning on the tube-layout charts of its TVs of the 1950s through the end of the tube era: "Replace tubes with same type as originally supplied." The same advice applies to any TV, radio or other tube-powered device of any make or model. The use of substitutes for original tubes (including CRTs) is an emergency procedure, to be used only in case the correct tube(s) is/are not available.

BTW, if one of your sets has UHF, it must be post-April, 1964. I can't imagine Stromberg-Carlson including UHF tuners in its 1950s sets, unless they were selling them in TV markets with only UHF stations such as Youngstown, Ohio, et al.

1. The cap was on. I just hit the door molding and the cap and the end of the neck broke off. If you are familiar with these sets, you will know that the neck sticks out 5 inches beyond the back of the cabinet.

2. If you look at the photos, you will see that they are 1954 vintage, not sixties as you suggest. The UHF tuner is there. Believe it or not. I had to restring the damn thing. One of the favorite jobs, not! My 1950 Dumont RA-109 has a spot for a UHF tuner, which is says right on the cover. I've never seen one with it though. Don't know where you are coming up with this post 1964 deal. I've seen plenty of fifties sets with UHF. Had a 53 or 54 Crosley with it a while back. UHF was big around here in rural areas.

The FCC declared that all television receivers made and marketed in the U. S. on or after April 30, 1964 must have UHF as well as VHF tuners. This was to ensure that all new TVs made after that date would receive the then-new UHF stations, although Blonder-Tongue and other manufacturers continued to manufacture and market UHF converters for some years after that date for those viewers with VHF-only sets (there were plenty of those still in service well into the 1970s, so B-T, et al. were in business well after the UHF mandate).

I mentioned in my post that all-channel TVs may have been available in television markets that had only UHF stations, but neglected to say that some of the first UHF stations in large cities were started in the 1950s on high UHF channels (do a search by call sign for UHF channels in any major city for more information on this), so there was a market for all-channel sets back then -- even in cities such as Chicago, New York, et al.

However, not all TV markets in this country had UHF television stations in the 1950s. I live near Cleveland and remember when the first UHF station came to the area. The year was 1965 and the station was WVIZ-TV on channel 25, an affiliate of what was then known as NET (National Educational Television), now PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). The Cleveland area did not get its first commercial UHF station (WUAB, channel 43, then an independent station, now NE Ohio's MyTV affiliate), however, until three years later.

But I digress. The point is that from 1948 (the date of the initial sign-on of WNBK-TV, the NBC affiliate in Cleveland, then on channel 4) until 1965, Cleveland had no UHF television stations whatsoever; the nearest one was in Akron, Ohio, some 60 miles southwest, and not receivable anywhere in the Cleveland area, so most residents of the Cleveland metro area had no use for UHF until WVIZ arrived in '65 -- and even then there were reception problems galore, as at the time the station was broadcasting with just one megawatt (one million watts) of power. I grew up in an eastern suburb of Cleveland which the signal did not reach worth a plugged nickel, unless large rooftop antennas were used. I remember trying to receive the station with a UHF loop antenna on my family's Silvertone 17" all-channel portable, and seeing mostly snow -- with a faint WVIZ test pattern showing in the background. The situation did not change until we got cable, in 1982.

If the on-off switch is mounted to the volume pot like most you may be able to pry off the bad switch and replace it from a like unit. Or, short it out temporarly for testing purposes and replace it later. I feel safer plugging my vintage stuff into a terminal strip anyways and try to save wear and tear on those sometimes unobtanum switches.

That's all fine and good but I have never lived near Cleveland. All I'm saying is that this 1954 Stromberg Carlson has UHF. I've also had a Crosley from the same vintage that had UHF. I've seen a number of other brands and models from this vintage with UHF. I don't care about the FCC rulings, when UHF came on the air, etc. I know many sets of this vintage didn't have it, but some did. That's all I'm saying.

Of course they had it as an option. When I was a kid a friend had a 21" mahogany Philco about 1952 vintage with the UHF sliderule dial like a radio dial in the middle of the control panel. Turning the turret tuner to UHF illuminated the slide rule dial and its continuous tuning.

Philco furnished a conversion kit that fitted perfectly. It had an adaptor plug the went between the audio output tube and the socket.
Milwaukee was a UHF town real early. It was all politics. Chicago didn't have UHF until the 60's.:scratch2:

If you don't care about the FCC rules regarding the UHF mandate, why did you even ask me where I got my information about it in the first place? :scratch2:

However, I admit that I did go too far when I rambled on about the history of UHF TV in Cleveland; for that I apologize. If you didn't care to read it, however, you didn't need to. I was only trying to explain why some TVs had UHF tuners as early as the 1950s, when UHF telecasting was still a novelty in the US.

New York City had lots of VHF channels, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 so no real need for UHF, and as the few UHFs were in Spanish, English only speakers never missed UHF. Orginally 13 was a commercial station, but they folded and someone bought it out and made it an educational channel in the early 60s. So forget about trying to set up an English language UHF channel, if a VHF channel couldn't cut it. Market saturation. Until the mid 70s when New Jersey set up its own educational network of stations on UHF.

Speaking of educational TV, someone provided my grammar school TV sets in every classroom. Which the teachers never used, as educational TV never taught anything that would show on the annual achievement tests we had. Testing ala "No Child Left Behind" is nothing new...
http://www.wa2ise.com/radios/classtv.jpg

Didn't you go to a private Catholic school. If so, You received a superior education over the public schools at the time. I know I did.

In grade school, we had TVs that were moved from one classroom to another as needed. Channel 25, WVIZ, was the only educational station in Cleveland at the time (mid-'60s). In junior high we had TVs that were also more or less permanently set on WVIZ, except when the teachers wanted us to see shows like the Today Show or the local news on channel 3 (WKYC, NBC) in Cleveland, as part of our world-affairs classes. These TVs were not connected to a MATV (master antenna TV) system as my junior high school did not have one that worked worth a darn -- we watched channels 3 and 25 on rabbit ears, but I don't remember what the large RCA set in our world-affairs class had for UHF; probably a loop antenna that worked little better (at the time, I lived in an eastern Cleveland suburb that was at least 30 miles from all Cleveland television stations and got very poor reception of WVIZ on indoor antennas).

When I got to senior high school, there were TV jacks in every room, connected to both the master TV antenna installation and a closed-circuit TV system. The televisions in the classrooms were mostly used for viewing videotaped programming over the in-house CCTV system; however, I don't recall these sets ever being tuned to local Cleveland network stations, even for news or the educational station (NET, National Educational Television, at that time [early 1970s], now PBS).

For WA2ISE: I remember seeing a picture in Popular Science magazine years ago of a group of TVs, all tuned to New York City's channel 13 showing a test pattern -- only then the station was known as WNDT and was probably not an NET affiliate at that time.

I looked up WNDT on Google a while back, and discovered that the station was in fact a commercial station (New Dimension Television, hence the NDT in the call sign) in its early years. I don't recall if the article mentioned when WNDT became a public-TV station, but when it did it changed calls to WNET -- for National Educational Television, but remained on channel 13.

You make me feel "old". There were no "video tape" mechanisms - at least at a consumer level. The first video recorder I had ever seen was when I was a senior in College working at a TV station were there was a big cabinet Ampex using something like 3" wide tapes on big reels.

Nary a Television in any school or college I attended ... then again, we did not have calculators either - just "slide rules" :-)

Carl

Interesting history here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNET
It appears that the WNDT calls remained for several years after the station became "educational"... some interesting union legal battles involving the teachers/actors on the station as well.

jr

I remember when I was a kid, the first TV we had in school was one of those big table Zenith's with the pop up speaker. The 4th grade teacher brought it from home. The next year we got a couple of new Setchell Carlson's. It seems SC must have had an in at schools in Minnesota, since they were made in MN, as for the next few years, every set at school was an SC.

As far as this Stromberg Carlson goes, at least I feel a little better now.

Back in the seventies when I was in grade school we had Magnavox and Rca Victor tvs in our classrooms I remember it took atleast 3 to 5 min. for these tvs to come on. our tv stations were WIPS channel 14 and WEDF channel 17. When I attended School for the blind our dormitories had Zenith, RCA, GE consoles and those were also tube type as well my personal tv for my dorm room were RCA, Zenith, Motorola I had more than 1 tv in my room my first dorm had a 1962 Zenith roundie that was the best tv on campus. .. Timothy

Watched a great Sterling Hayden movie tonight all the way through. This, I believe, was Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in a major production. The picture is much better than it photographed. Still a little tweaking to do.

Actually, 13's status as a commercial station was under two call letters - WATV (1948-58) and WNTA-TV (1958-61). In 1961 - with the help of FCC commissioner Newton Minow - an educational group stepped in to purchase 13 from National Telefilm Associates which had owned the station since 1958 but was losing money hand to foot over it. It had been a non-commercial, educational outlet ever since it was reborn as WNDT in 1962. Within a few short years of that, it was airing NET programs. It was the last of the New York area VHF's to go color in 1967 (this was presumably when the pics of the color test pattern were taken off various color TV sets for that early 1968 issue of Popular Science referred to earlier - 13 most certainly was an NET affiliate by that point). The 1970 call change to WNET was the result of a forced merger between NET and the station's parent Educational Broadcasting Corporation.