Got some weird kit tv????
 

This one was interesting. Spotted it at an estate sale on Friday (took a couple vacation days) but went back today on half-price day knowing it would still be there. And yep, it was. Got it for almost nothing :)

Pretty sure this set was a kit of some kind, but more accurately it looks like something used for classroom instruction on TV repair. Every control, every tube, etc is clearly labeled, even on the underside of the chassis. Picture tube is a 19GWP22. Even got a screen mask for the picture tube.

Powered up on a variac, it gets full sound, but almost no vertical sweep.....probably needs a standard recap. Lots of black cats underneath. But man this thing is built well. What it is exactly, not sure. What I'm gonna do with it, same answer :D

very cool nice find.

Looks like an RCA yoke housing.
Hows about a few part numbers off some diferent things & maybe
we can ID it. Looks like nothing I have ever seen.
Nice find......

73 Zeno:smoke:

"What am I gonna do w/it ?"... Like THAT'S ever slowed down or stopped virtually any of the membership of THIS forum...

Build a plexiglass cabinet for it maybe? That'll make it stand out.

I can't find a part number on it ANYwhere. But here's some more pics.....

Couple more. See how it's labeled underneath as well?

Mystery chassis with a RCA yoke, where have I seen that before...

we had a 17" ge color yc chassis i believe with a plexiglass back. and extensions on the back of the plug in modules for making trouble so we could see the trouble and figure it out. that set played all day every day and had one of the brightest and sharpest pictures i have seen on a tv set from that era. it would have been a 1977 or a 1978 model. i would have loved to have that set i am sure it has been long gone for years.

this was a 2 year vocational college course i attended. tv
& radio repair

The pincushion transformer looks an RCA design too. I'd go over the tubes used and go from there to see what's similar. I'm not saying that it's an RCA but the circuitry may be derived from "patented" RCA designs..

It does an institutional look to it for sure. Interesting piece!

Ain't that the truth. :smoke:

The wiring underneath the chassis looks to be very clean and pristine for an older set - especially one from the tube chassis era. Most of the wiring in sets I work on it dusty, dirty and often cracked and slightly melted.

Are any of the circuits labelled on the chassis? It certainly looks like something used for training purposes, though could alternatively just be the product of a very thorough home handyman. :scratch2: I always label the tubes on the chassis when I work on a set, and if I were to build one from a kit, I know I'd take the time to properly label all the tubes, connectors and controls to assist in any future repairs or adjustments.

Chris

That last picture you posted? It increased your Internet Respect Points balance by 1500. I doff my hat to anybody who actually rocks out in a workshop that has purple walls. Actually, it looks like you fed a "violet" color band from a resistor into the magic pigment-my-paint-this-color machine. :king:

This tells me that the builder of this set owned a label maker and this set was made to be easily and quickly repaired.

This set reminds me of Johnny Cash's one-piece-at-a-time car, in that the building style reminds me of an early 1950's Conrac monitor, but the parts obviously are from the late 1960's or early 1970's and hint RCA design. I cannot understand why he wired the sweep with green hookup wire and the video with red wire.

Except for Heathkit, I do not remember any other color TV kits during the probable era and this is unlike the Heaths.

With that said, the best potential clue may lie in who built the printed circuit boards.

I noticed a couple of caps that seemed to be just tacked in and not properly mounted. Could this be a testing prototype for a limited run custom production, say a military or NASA contract?

James

Heh :D

My whole basement has purple walls. I keep all of my television madness to one room. And right now, the sucker is PACKED, much beyond my comfort level.

I put that old kitchen rug on top the Zenith roundie so the cats wouldn't try to jump on it and slide off and use claws to try to gain traction, but now it's their favorite place to sleep. Oh well.

And yes, that's only one angle :sigh:

I like that space age clock!

It maybe a "Arkay"color kit!, I have a Arkay B&W 19"TV kit built in 1964'
That I'm building from scratch I have the heater circuit done
And trying to find a isolation transformer before I complete it safely
Since it's series string 16 tube HOT CHASSIS!,I need one to complete
It!

A brewsky fridge right next to a bunch of TV sets, hog heaven for many guys. No giant flat panel for the big game, just fire up a bunch of smaller sets as a quick and dirty solution.

...

Nah. If I decide to restore it and keep it, I'll build my own custom cabinet for it. I'm not the best woodworker, but I DO know where there's an empty KCS47 cabinet I can get my hands on.....hm.....

i like it all.

Thinkin' about that the other day. In the early '60s when I was a kid the neighbors on either side of us and some other friends had their TVs flush mounted into the wall. One used a closet, another stuck into an adjacent room and another the chassis protruded into the garage. Not the best conditions considering the temp swings we get.

The pin transformer looks RCA but the part # isnt there style of either part # or drawing #. No EIA number on it either.
The date code is 23rd week 1971. It sure as hell is well built but
it may remain a mystery.

73 Zeno:smoke:

Now that is cool.

Made some room, sold the Curtis Mathis console stereo on CL this afternoon. Nice little profit. I'm finding that tube record players of any style in working order move pretty fast on CL....

After re-reading your post, I looked closer at the circuit boards.

The boards are VERY clearly marked with each capacitor value, and labeled with the banded side. Definitely a kit TV. Maybe a Conar or something? Who knows.....

One thing I did notice on power up was that the 6GF7 wasn't lighting up at all. Tests good on the tester too. Kind of flying blind in doing any kind of restoration on this set without a schematic, and I'm not even 100% sure the sucker ever totally worked....which is the problem with kit electronics.

Tubes are almost all RCA with the newer logo. UHF tuner is stamped MEXICO 0969.

Hm.

No PC board part numbers silk screened on the printed circuit boards? That would have been my hope of identifying the ancestry of the design. It smells like a low-volume training school kit, but I wouldn't have guessed they would go so far to make an unlabeled knock off of a commercial color chassis, and even less that they would design one themselves. That's a huge job.

One correspondence school (the name will come to me) used an unbranded (at least in their magazine ads) Heathkit, and I think later an unbranded Zenith/Heathkit that was less soldering and more snap-together.

COOL! I sure hope you get that set figured out. I love to tackle a mystery like that. It sure does look like some sort of training chassis . I wonder if it would do any good to browse some 60s/early 70s electronics magazines to see if a picture of that chassis shows up in the advertising for any of the technical schools of the day. Although it seems very unlikely, my thoughts keep wandering back to the idea of a homebrew set designed and built by some meticulous engineer.....Just for fun, of course.

Presumably the fasteners are all machine screws/nuts rather than rivets, right?

Correct....the boards are all screwed into place.

The knobs look a lot like the knobs on this NRI Conar TV kit:

http://books.google.com/books?id=8v2...t%20tv&f=false

Me thinks the Conar is a Heath Kit.

73 Zeno:smoke:

Arkay kit

The labels look pre-printed, not something you would do yourself with a Dymo labeller or rubber stamps.. So I'd guess this was a limited run meant for instructional purposes, maybe for trade schools, maybe even made BY a trade school. Remember all those old ads in 1960s electronics magazines?

NRI was the National Radio Institute, a trade school of the 1960s. Their ads appeared quite often in magazines such as Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and one or two others. This color TV was included in one of their TV correspondence courses, although I don't recall ever seeing the cabinet included with the set. IIRC, most of these correspondence-school TVs were offered as the chassis only, meant to be installed in a custom cabinet or wall mount. Heathkit also had several TV kits for which the cabinet was optional, but was available directly from them for an extra charge.

Did just a base recap of the set, not including the filters. No change. No vertical sweep....the 6GF7 is still dark, and that's the key to the whole issue here I think.

Now, since I don't know what this set is and nobody else does either with any certainty, suggestions as to where I should go from here? I can do the filters, I just don't feel like it if that won't cure the issue :)

Normally right about now I'd start testing chassis voltages, but God only knows what this TV even IS to try to get a schematic for it.

Why don't you see if you can restore filament voltage to the 6GF7 and go from there? It shouldn't be tough to trace out even without a schematic.

Good luck, it looks like a fun project!

That's kind of what the capacitor replacement was about. There were a whole bunch of black beauties in that section that I replaced.

The problem is, in part, that I have no way of knowing if everything is even hooked up correctly or if there isn't something missing. Who knows if this set EVER worked.

Fun? Pfft. This is ten dollars worth of television hell :D

Well, for sure you need 6.3 volts on the heater pins of the 6GF7 (Pins 4&5) perhaps a wire is poorly soldered or missing, or the tube socket pin is broken/corroded. I would get some juice to the tube heater and see what happens.

jr

Ditto that

:deal: