Got a Dumont RA-103 Dog(mouse)House and a GE monitor.
 

I went to Olorin67's place today to buy a GE video monitor from him. I find tube era video monitors interesting and like to buy them when the price is good....This one came from my Alma-mater as a bonus factor of interest.

On the way back I picked up a Dumont Dog House at a Habitat For Humanity store, that he had suggested might be of interest to me....Man was that habitat store hard to find! I went past it almost twice before noticing it. The set was easy to find, and when I asked the clerk about the price (since it had multiple tags on it, and had been there weeks) I was asked to make an offer. The set and the 60's stand it was on cost me the 30$ I offered.

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps76dtyyuh.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psfogsbspo.jpg

Unfortunately Mom spotted roaches in the habitat store so both sets have to spend overnight (or longer if it don't frost) in the shed.....Mom's policy seems to be if a set comes from a good home it must stay overnight in the garage to quell her fear of getting roaches, if something is in a roach prone area or was likely exposed to roaches even indirectly it gets some shed time....

The tuning shaft on the Dumont is messed up so that will probably be an interesting issue. Both CRTs are untested. I'd assume schematics for the Dumont can be found on the ETF site, but I may have to fix the GE without service data.

Been busy installing hard wood flooring with the folks and have other sets including pay projects in the works that will keep me from really getting into these for a while yet.

Glad both sets went to a good home, I would have grabbed the Dumont, if funds allowed and I had some idea how to fix the tuning shaft.. That set had been there since early August.

Tom Albrecht repaired one of those tuning shafts on his Crosley 9-407 (with the same Dumont chassis) a while back; you should be able to find his discussion of it. He had an excellent description of the problem and his work.

Brought them in the garage and tested the CRTs. The one in the GE tests excellent. :thmbsp:
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pshnl88abg.jpg
The CRT in the Dumont had an unplugged brightener on it. It started off bad, but with brightener level heater voltage got almost as good as the CRT in the GE...Dropping back to 6.3V after that got me the bottom edge of the good range.
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psmqyczju1.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psrsx1bkhk.jpg

Better pictures:
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psqtqj97yv.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psnpv75avf.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pssqc8ilxz.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pslp7ucdbo.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps1nn0gz6s.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps9xjwhx1r.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pswp71u5qv.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psow5dhl96.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psgn5netpg.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psjy2alv0q.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps9h292zqh.jpg



Good to know. VK's search function did not find it. Got a link?

More pictures:

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps6cs7s1qq.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psc3mpq0zn.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pstyikbogu.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psvgmefwnh.jpg

Not having recently looked at pictures of the inductuner mech, the impression I get from the mech is that the dial/knob is connected to the tuner shaft via gearing, and the retainer for the knob shaft is damaged.....If I push it in and turn it feels like I'm engaging gummy gears. I can get some gear grinding feel/noise if the shaft is not pushed in correctly when turning.

What HFH store was it? The one on 104th and Burleigh?
The parking lot is awful small too! That store is very poorly organized, but at least you got something, that was worth the trip. :thmbsp:

Don't crank that inductuner mechanism too hard until you have a chance to pull the chassis and give it a careful cleaning & inspection. This article has some photos of the tuner:

http://antiqueradio.org/DuMontRA-103Television.htm

I've heard of those tuners having a broken ceramic shaft. My RA-113 even had a broken gear in the mechanism. Those things might have happened when lubricant dried up and turned hard, and then someone forced the tuner.

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

114th & Burleigh. The lot is small, but finding it after dark was hard enough to distract me from it.

http://www.antiqueradios.com/forums/...t=crosley+9407

Tom's discussion on his 9-407 restoration

I was gentle with it when turning it. If the user shaft was properly pushed in to place it felt as though it was turning other gears (silent mild resistance to rotation)....My hunch is that the tuner shaft is free albeit a pinch gummy, and all that is wrong is the user control shaft. In any event I don't intend to mess with it until I pull the chassis and can see what exactly is going on.

Thanks.

I thought I read somewhere that the part of the shaft is ceramic.

I usually tried to stop there, when I'm in town but haven't found anything, so I didn't bother the last few times.
BTW, I hope to see you at the Landmark tommorow. I have the items loaded in my car, that you were interested in. :thmbsp:

I plan to make it.

Nice Du Mont, but where's the refrigerator?

The only GE monitor top fridge I ever had a chance to save hit the dumpster when I was 8 or 9 years old. Grandma had us cleaning out her other house and despite my best attempts at arguing to keep it in existence or offer it to an appliance collector (I knew they existed, even back then) my mom and her sisters tossed it anyway.....Mom sorta listened to me/got what I was saying but did not want to be responsible for trying to do something with it that would take more effort than the dumpster....

Yes, much of the shaft is ceramic. You can see photos in the article that I mentioned earlier:

http://antiqueradio.org/DuMontRA-103Television.htm

Phil Nelson

When it rains it pours...
 

When it rains it pours...

I got the 10" Stromberg-Carlson (model TS-10) version of the Dumont RA-103 yesterday for 30$ at the WARCI meet. I always thought the S-C badged version was more stylish. It will probably get priority over the DuMont, and is more likely to be permanently kept.

The tuner seems to be in similar perhaps worse shape. I'll test the CRT after lunch. For now have some pictures:
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psitdq8cj8.jpg

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psv8st82an.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psqmvi6cq1.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psyndsdvpp.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pssfznzwqu.jpg


EDIT: CRT is quite healthy (just like the seller said), and reads 86% on my CRT tester. It should produce a bright picture after a resto.

Both are awesome sets! Hope to find either one fine day. Post the restorations!!!

Thanks. I've got fellow VK'er Arcanine's CTC-16 on my bench right now and 3-4 other color sets ahead of these Dumonts in line waiting, and some other stuff, but I'll try to post the restos once they reach my bench.

Dumont MOUSEhouse
 

Well I brought the trio in from the garage so the cars can go in there once the winter weather eventually starts, and started noticing the Dumont has musty smell like some 30's radios but worse.....Turns out that smell is mice....I pulled the chassis and had about a basket balls worth of mouse nest and turds. :yuck: The little cretans ate the wiring harnesses, paper caps and peed all over the place corroding much of the chassis....Ooh, and the ceramic tuner shaft is broken.
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psbm3a4gyx.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psx0bdhlfi.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psyl7iljr5.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pszylx4nk6.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psoxvyjxwd.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps6ztufubs.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psafb9ls2f.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps6k2zzmyl.jpg

The unit looks to originally have used a field coil speaker that was replaced with a PM speaker....Initially I thought that 16 (! jeez!) resistor kludge was the work of an idiot, but upon further reflection I think it may be a poor man's power resistor sub for the field coil. There are many poor repairs in it including a rectifier tube socket replacement.
I've about reached the point of declaring the mouse-house a parts set...

I've opened it's Stromberg Carlson doppelganger too, but I'll wait till the afternoon to post that story...

Yeah, about the speaker. My RA-103 has a 4 wire cable running up to the speaker, yet the speaker is a PM type and only has 2 wires coming from it. I am wondering what the other 2 wires were used for?, but I have not dug in that deep yet. I did get the feeling that the speaker in my RA-103 was not original, as the wires coming off the speaker were spliced.

Hi I have had a couple of sets that had meece nest in them but not that bad sometimes it is hard to clean the pee smell out of these wood cabinets it is a pain to clean the metal as well..Timothy

Ew! Mice gotta be right near the top of the list for bad housekeeping habits. Lately I've been walking away from messes like that, but it's so hard to let such a collectible set go unattended. It is about impossible to get that pee smell gone.

One of my Setchell Carlson school TVs had a big mouse nest, fortunately it was below the chassis, was able to vacuum it all out after removing modules, didnt find anything chewed up, thankfully. Still smells a bit though.

is there much concern about hantavirus?
 

We brave asbestos, cadmium and a host of other dangerous substances when restoring vintage sets, but I wonder if many here are concerned about hantavirus. I know that I would think twice about working on a set like that, but perhaps the risk is smaller in other parts of the country.

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marb...emite-outbreak

jr

Tom, I have an RA103 Savoy that was a barn-find. I sold the CRT to GregB and I doubt Ill restore it because the cabinet is missing doors, knobs etc.

BUT I'll look at the tuner shaft and maybe its what you need. Yes, I am concerned about hantavirus but deer mice are not as common as field mice here.

BTW - Who said it best about those bastards?

Jinxy the cat!
"I hate meeces to pieces"

That neatly tied wire harness is really something ! I wonder if it was made up
outside the tv, like airplane and automotive wire harnesses, and put into the
tv as it was assembled...? The straightness I think would suggest that.....

Anyway, you got a lotta work there restoring that tv..... Bleaching a few times should
get the smell out..... Put it out in the sun and air in the summer too....

.

Tom, For what it's worth, I had reasonable results using CLR to remove similar mouse goo from my Stromberg Carlson TC-125 chassis. The LCR did not dissolve surrounding cad plating like Navel Gel does. But it's a painfully slow process, and the stuff is so thin it want's to run everywhere. Oh, keep it away from any zinc plating, it'll turn that stuff black. http://s452.photobucket.com/user/Kue...ssis%20Cleanup

It has been mouse free for 2-3 months (assuming the habitat store did not have mice too), but was in cool outdoor temps for the ~2 months I've had it...I sure hope I don't get hantavirus...

I plan to restore the Stromberg Carlson first and use parts from the Dumont as needed. The S-C doesn't even have a tuner shaft. I'm thinking I might be able to epoxy the Dumont shaft back together and do a tuner swap. The S-C chassis is cleaner, but is missing things like the tuner shaft, half the clear dial scale and speaker. When removing the Stromberg chassis there was some weird hangup in the cabinet, that I later found was a loose lytic bending a shield (which I straightened).

Pictures of the Stromberg Carlson chassis.
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pskhoyrcsg.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psldnvnsle.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pswbzb2q8a.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pskndk0rh7.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps9ciovupm.jpg

Once the S-C is working right I'll decide if I should fix, sell or part out the Dumont.

Ooh, that looks pretty clean and original on the under side.

Tom Albrecht did a nice description of his repair of an Inductuner shaft a while back that may help you.

The GE monitor will be the next to get serviced.....It is perhaps the first GE device with a CRT I've opened up that I can honestly say looks very well built.

I'd guess this was a non-standard size rack-mount chassis given that the only way to remove the chassis is from the front, and that the 6 screws holding it were on the face panel.

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps5c4utp7w.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psrdb184bn.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psfdynwpcx.jpg

The four jacks on the back seem to be V sync, H sync, and two bridged video terminals. I've found a switch on top of the chassis for selecting internal or external sync so it would seem it is designed to be capable of syncing to composite video....That will make feeding this set video much easier!

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psnjzn0tsy.jpg

All the tubular caps are in nice easy places to get to, and of nice common values that my dwindling cap stock is still flush with. The variety of different cap types from Sprague Vitamin Q to those cheap yellow "Astron" caps often found in Heathkits of the era makes me wonder if it was repaired a lot or if GE just used whatever caps were cheap any given day of the week.... There was also a solder splash in it that would support it being serviced at some point.
It says 'GE closed circuit television' on the front so I'd guess it is an industrial, but not broadcast monitor...Still it is built well enough to be either.
This will be my first time restoring an industrial grade tube device.

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psgmvvsxnl.jpg

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pswzgvlhmh.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps9xvoign7.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pszjslxe5x.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pskpbh3flq.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psx7qsaepk.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psexwpyz2o.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psykw0int1.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psnijjozuj.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps3ixspzqd.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psvnvasnpb.jpg

More pictures.

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pshkbvmpyo.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pswzvz5vhm.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pszok6h5st.jpg

Only thing I've had to guess on so far is the missing HV rectifier tube (and the rating of the top fuse)....It is a 9-pin tube with a top cap...The only tube like that I know of is type 1X2, and it's pin-out seems to match the socket (also my 14" GE portable TVs use that tube that way) so I'm going to go with it for now.

1AX2 is possible, but not likely.

That GE monitor is very interesting. So is that a GE 12KP4 CRT?

It certainly looks aluminumized.

Will be cool to see it come back to life, after I had stored it for 25 years...I don't suppose there's much hope of finding a schematic for something like this?

Wow, this set has been stored longer than I've lived...
If it was broadcast gear or the right person hung on to the schematic, then it might still exist someplace...Finding it is the hard part...I'm accustomed to flying blind on some projects (as I'm doing here)...

It now basically lives. I was able to test and replace all bad caps (except for the lytics) in 1hour and 5 minutes.:thmbsp: The Vitamin Q style caps were still good as new (as in previous encounters with those great caps) so I plan to leave them in. I proceeded to variac it up and was able to get a picture, but the sync and other things were not as stable as they should be.

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps7ns4aiuw.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pseqkic2mq.jpg
http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pszuruikhy.jpg

I then removed the face and CRT to clean them and the chassis. I found the black mark in the center (that looked like ion burn) was just dirt, and that one of the lytics had got warm and peed it's self...I had time to test and replace (cause they were bad) all but the one insulated can (untested) and a small tubular lytic under the HV section (that tested good) which I may replace just for the heck of it. Tomorrow (well technically later today) those caps will be dealt with, the tubes will be tested and I'll put the CRT back in and give it a retest.

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psh6xvfn9i.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psu6siagvs.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psgcm3ggh9.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psarm3sapd.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psq6izfq7p.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...ps7otxad8k.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psgkprj3bg.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psodladjdw.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psmn8xatny.jpg

Yup! The set has it's (most likely) original GE 12KP4A, still going strong.

http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...pskreeqekb.jpg http://i1095.photobucket.com/albums/...psaxrqw1bj.jpg

Cool! I found that set around 1988, next to the trash chute in the basement of MSOE dorm RWJ. Wasn't sure what I wanted it for.. but couldn't' see it thrown out. Sent most of the years in my old room in my parents house, then in my storage locker. I wonder what MSOE used it for originally?, must have been an expensive piece of equipment back then.