My First antique tele restoration!!!1
 

At a antique shope today and say this tv sitting behind the counter just sitting there pluged in and humming away with its bad filter caps so i bought the "broken set" for 45.00 at least i know the audio kinda works. Since i got it this afternoon i have cleaned all of the pots removed all of the grease from the inside (must have been next to a deep fryer all of its life.) and i just finnished making a list of all the capacitors i need.
:thmbsp:

What brand/model is it. Will you be able to post pictures ?

sorry, i forgot to upload the photos just a minit and i put some up. it has no model number only a chassis number.

Good luck and more details please. I've been to numerous antique shops in Chicago and they've all been clueless about their radios and TVs for sale.

here. the chassis isnt to cramped underneath also where could i buy the caps nowhere seems to have the right value.

Anyone know where i can get a schamatic?

Sam's technical publishing's website should have it, though is not necessarily the cheapest source. The hum could be video related rather than bad lytics.......Zenith used some darned good lytics in the 50's-70's. If the lytics run cool after the set has been on an hour or so, and putting a new cap in parallel with the existing lytics yields no improvement then I'd leave the lytics alone. Instead I'd focus on the paper, molded plastic, and tubular ceramic caps which are not as good at this point in their lives.

Zenith sets tend to out live most other brands......I've got older Zeniths that still work on original caps so if you had a watchable picture on the screen I would not be the least bit surprised.

Those 60ish year old lytics not shorting out and frying your power transformer is a gamble you're willing to make. I definitely discourage recommending anybody make the same gamble without making very clear what the stakes are: black smoke and loss of costly and hard to find components if you lose.

This article has info about identifying old caps and ordering replacements:

http://antiqueradio.org/recap.htm

Do yourself a favor and replace the electrolytics as David advised.

For TV restorations, I get most parts from http://www.mouser.com/ and http://www.justradios.com/ .

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

I am not willing to make the Gamble with these caps because i know they could go today or in 20 years.
phil, I dont even know if i can count how many times i have read over your site before doing a radio repair its really been alot of help.:thmbsp:

Zenith only made two years of sets with the upright chassis. I think the technicians complained about them being hard to work on. You had too much disassembly to troubleshoot and replace parts. After that, they advertised, their sets were the ones that most technicians prefered.:yes:

Its nice to see another whos just getting into these. Listen to what these guys say, its saved me from some costly mistakes.

Right.

I found one shorted 'lytic in my DuMont set that killed the power transformer, but never leaked tar or anything. I doubt that it even smoked.

Not sure if you are aware of this, but the whole chassis/crt bezel assembly comes out through the front of the cabinet. There will be some screws behind the safety glass nameplate, behind the large knobs and some at the rear top and bottom. My set is the slightly newer 17Z22Q chassis with the space command remote. My main power supply cap on was blistering/leaking. Minus the safety glass and knobs with the screws removed, lay the set on it's face and lift off the cabinet. Don't forget those speaker wires!

Howard Sams covers the 17Y20 chassis in Photofact 335-19.

Forgot to mention. Instead of restuffing the original P/S cap I found a simular value by doubling the terminals together. I needed an 80/40uf@400V/60uf@50Volt. I bought a replacement 40/40/20/20@425V, paralled the values together and hung seperately the 60@50V. As for the smaller C2 cap I restuffed that one as it's in a tight spot minus the cathode capacitor value for the audio output. Simple!

I cant afford any of those big huge caps so would it be fesable to paralell 8 10µF caps to get the 80 mfd cap i know it would be rather clunky bu would it work?

also, i have never been good at reading the black beuaaty caps and there is one that looks like it will have a large rating but im unshure i get 15 mfd at 1,000 v bu could someone please check it for me with the foil facing my left it goes brown green yellow purple blank space and yellow agan.

If you get the schematic, you can look up the values rather than guess or try to read them off the old caps.

The article at http://antiqueradio.org/recap.htm has a section on identifying capacitor values, including this chart:

http://antiqueradio.org/art/recap13.jpg

I believe brown-green-yellow would be .15 mfd. That would be a reasonable value for that type of capacitor. As noted in the article, certain kinds of caps usually have values in a certain range. 15 mfd would be reasonable for an electrolytic, but not a bumblebee (paper) cap.

Wiring eight electrolytics in parallel sounds ugly, although it might work. Is it really that much cheaper to use eight caps in place of one?

Phil Nelson

That seems to be 0.15uF at 400 volts to me, but others may know better.

Oops, double post. Ironically, I was double-checking my reading on your capacitor page, Phil!

.15 sounds much better. doing the paralell thing i can replace all of the filter caps for under 7.00 and if it dosent work i have several projects going on right now that need a few 10's. This better work!
I have all of my parts picked out on mouser and im going to order them tommrow morning!

Not sure on this chassis, but pay attention to what the B+ Boost cap is and how it is wired in the circuit. Most times it will be tied to ground or in my case it "floats" between the B+ and B+ Boost sources. This will dictate a non-polorized application! However, good luck in trying to find a 10uf@400v non-polar!!

Although some may understandably cringe, you can tie two electrolytics together in series and connect the negatives together. For my 10uf application, I used two 22uf@450v as capacitance decreases in series, getting the desired value. This is "acceptable" but it's always best to use designed non-polars if possible. My Howard Sams in the parts description lists this as an alternative also.

I've run the set considerably and the cap(s) run cool and work as intended.

As for that .15@400v cap, it's got boosted/pulsed B+ on it and ties to the plate of the Damper Tube. IMO I would use a good quality orange drop and step up the voltage rating to 600V.
I've got a good stock of these and if money is an issue I'd be glad to send you one!

Where can i buy the decals on the top that say horozontal vertical brightness contrast ect? I looked on all of the sites like antique radio supply ect but no noe had them.

I've paralleled 4x 22MFD to replace an 80MFD cap before (the extra 8 MFD really did not matter in the circuit I used it in) and all was fine. I've paralleled 5x 22 to make up replacements for 100 MFD doubler caps before as well. The key is to mind the polarity on lytics.

can a .068 paper cap be subed for a .058 mouser sent me the wrong capacitor it says i ordered .068 on the bag buta .058 is on the capacitor?

It is probably close enough, yes. .058 is an unusual value; if you have trouble with that circuit later, you could use a .047 and .01 in parallel instead.

thanks i didnot want to blow it up or something.

ok got all of the caps in and nothing no raster there is a buzzing sound tht goes up and down wiht the volume control and the tubes seem to be glowing unusually bright.

I powered it up in a dark room today to see of i could see any sparks anywhere and inside of the 5a4ga rectifyer tube there are sparks flying around inside it and it got really hot really fast! Does anyone have any clues? guess i have to get a schamatic now....

Yes, please get the schematic.

Do not power up the TV any more until you have double-checked all of your capacitor replacements against the schematic.

Make sure that the polarity of the new electrolytics is correct and that the old electrolytics are disconnected. The new electrolytics should not be wired in parallel with the old ones.

Phil Nelson

If you still need the Sams send me a PM with your address, I should be able to rustle you up a copy.

Well i havent had time to work on the tv yet (eoc exams and staar testing all happening right now...) but my grandpa is coming down from Missouri to visit us in a few weeks and he usd to repair tvs on the side in the 70s and 60s sadly he threw all of this stuff out in the 90s when he moved to a new house.

Well i had a few minutes of free time today so i thought that i would check the Instamatic and see if i could find anything oubiously wrong within 15 minutes i found 3 capacitors from a previous repair that had cold solder joints (one of these caps was connected to the wrong place) and 1 cap that i had replaced was soldered to the wrong lug of the terminal strip. Tonight i will check the resistors though none look burnt or anything there are probably a few out of tolerances that i should go ahead and replace now so i don't have to open it back up.

OK so i fixed the previous "repaired" and the one mistake i made and and nothing but tubes no longer glow so bright I did not hookup a speaker up to it yet to see if there was sound but i know there was no high voltage (i held a fluorescent light up to the wire that comes from the flyback) any ideas now i am going to go check for wiring mistakes and check all resistors for out of tolorence and also does it look like it has a replacement transformer?

and we have video sorta but no sound! heres the link:banana:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0zkDtCY4lM
I know that its not great but its a start!!!

Light on the screen is progress. You have HV of some sort and the vertical sweep circuit is trying to work.

Don't play it for long periods with a bright horizontal line on the screen. That can eventually burn a permanent dark line in the picture tube.

If somebody else messed with it in the past, that is all the more reason to sit down with the schematic next to the TV and double-check everything for wiring mistakes, components with wrong values, dripped blobs of solder, short circuits caused by accidentally pushing the wire of a component so that it touches something else, etc., etc.

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

Trapezoidal pattern is almost always a yoke problem. If the wiring has been messed with, it might simply be miswired. If it hasn't been miswired, the yoke has developed leakage 'tween the H and V windings.

We'll there are splices everywhere and a few wires that are clipped off all of these are getting replaced according to the schamatic. Also does anyone in the Austin area have a tube tester and a crt tester that wouldnt mind me using for a moment?

Definitely get all of the tubes checked in the set. This was one of biggest of many mistakes I made on my first TV. Now testing every tube in the set it the second thing I do behind general cleaning of the chassis. I load up a shoebox with all the tubes and head to my local vintage radio shop where he can test all of them and replace any that are bad or questionable. Maybe there is a shop in your area that works on vintage stuff that can do likewise.
Oh and have fun with your set, don't get discouraged, ask many questions. The people here are an amazing wealth of information and always ready to help.

You lucky dog. Nary a one in my area.

Carl