RCA 630TS - Modified with Motor
 

I got this set today at an estate sale for $20. The owner had been an electrical engineer and had a lot of home-made electronics including audio equipment and computer items.

This set appears to have had a lot of modifications done to it. An electric motor was added as well as some additional controls and connectors on the chassis. Would this have been for a mechanical color wheel? I assume there would have needed to be an additional control chassis for that. There were a several custom built chassis at the sale, something may have been for this set, but by the time I bought it a lot of the stuff had already been sold. There were projects there that appear to have never been finished, maybe this was one of them. I haven't yet removed the chassis to see what was modified underneath. The motor has a multi-conductor cable that leaves the set.

Cabinet is in OK condition for age, but is missing the safety glass and top clip for the glass. CRT is a 10FP4.


-- Max

Additional photo.

Looks to me like it was modified for a color wheel. Yes, a control chassis would be needed for the motor.

You can see the wheel position sensor in the last picture.

That would be pretty cool to find the rest of the color wheel adapter and put it back together. What are your plans for the set?

It would be relatively easy to make it work. You'd need a new wheel, which could be made, and a servo circuit to control the motor speed. Then you'd need an Aurora standards converter from Darryl Hock.

BEcause of the blue coil wrapped around the flyback transformer and the modified relay coil for a position sensor pickup, I'll say this was a Colordaptor conversion. With a color wheel you can probably make this "color" set work again by looking through the Colordaptor pages at the ETF website: http://www.earlytelevision.org/search.html Lots of images and information here.
Type colordaptor into the search blank and about 6 different articles will appear.

One of them has a .pdf of the entire colordaptor manual which you can download.

Besy luck!

Old friend of mine built this one back in the day. His daughter donated it to the Museum after he passed on. They actually got it working at one point.
http://www.earlytelevision.org/colordaptor.html

I've seen a lot of vintage TV's over the years, but sets with that conversion are extremely uncommon and part of television history. It would be great to restore it as a color-wheel set, or sell it to someone, or a museum, who has the means to do it. Very cool find.

Nice catch, Cliff. You are right, this set was modified for NTSC color, not CBS color.

The winding on the flyback would be used for gating the color burst. Don't know off the top of my head if Colordaptor used this or some other method.

I always thought these were really cool. Am I right in thinking that if you got the required parts you could build one today? I think it would be a fun project.

Yes you can still build one. Servo circuits may need to be tweaked or improvised since 50's motors for that purpose are not likely easy to find.

A number of folks have made ones from scratch in the last decade or two.

If I found one half built like that I'd finish the job of adding the wheel.

When I finally restore a 40's 10-12" set that I like enough to keep I'll probably build a wheel type converter too. I've heard of someone making a small "personal viewer" type color wheel built into goggles on a long tether to the set.....Those would be cool to build, easy to store, and would not obscure the face of a set....

Thank you for the information on this set. For now I plan to keep it as a display item as a piece of electronics history. Unfortunately I don't have the time right now to try and make it an operational color set. I may decide to sell it in the future, it would be nice to see it working again.

I will try to post some additional photos under the chassis soon. I don't know if the owner ever finished the color conversion. I did not see a color wheel at the sale. There were several custom built chassis that may have been used with the set, but I wasn't able to identify them. The motor currently has a multi-conductor cable attached with bare wire ends, so it wasn't set up to just plug into something.

If you ever decide to sell I can tell you I would be interested in buying. I have always wanted to get one of these working

If the chassis are still available, take a picture of a completed Colordaptor chassis with you and see if you can find something similar:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/colordaptor.html

If it is there, it would be easy to get it working. Color wheels can be made and sometimes purchased.

Not only could you, but a friend of mine has done it. His works on the Goldmark/CBS color system:

http://www.labguysworld.com/Goldmark1_001.htm

Assuming you get a receiver to work using the CBS color system, what would you use for a source? I know ETF has a converter of some sort and is also working on making a color wheel camera make a picture. Those sound like fairly ambitious projects....

There is a universal standards converter that takes video input stores frames digitally and converts it into any format known (or requested): Mechanical, 441 line, 405 line, 405 experimental color, European standards, etc. It's called the Aurora standards converter and is made by a Darrel Hock IIRC. It is rather expensive though.

If I were building a color wheel set I'd probably go with the NTSC format color wheel adapter circuit instead of CBS color format.

Unless you have original CBS color equipment there is no advantage in using their wacky format with a color wheel unless you simply want to.

The receiver's modifications are for NTSC, not the CBS system.

t might be fun to recreate a faux color wheel with art supplies for display purposes until you decide what to do about it's restoration. With the knowledge of the members here and on ARF, you could likely get the approximate dimensions and design. That would make a very impressive conversation piece.
I have an article from an old magazine that shows college students watching a Crosley version of the 630 with a simple color wheel positioned in the same location as your RCA set. Strangely, the wheel looks rather small to fully cover the sets CRT face.

Stop by the next ETF convention (April 29-May 1, 2016) and you are guaranteed to see the difference!

The difference between NTSC :eek: color flicker at 10 fps, interlaced-6 vs CBS :) 24 fps interlaced-6, will be readily apparent.

The basic difference is the speed of the usually six segment color wheel: 600 rpm for NTSC and 1440 for CBS.

James.

I've been to the ETF. They only seem to run the CBS wheels as I recall (that or flicker was not visible from either system).

I don't see the value in spending a few hundred on a (overpriced) standards converter, then spending the money to build a wheel adapter, and at the end have a set that can't just go back to being NTSC monochrome without modification after removing the wheel, just to reduce flicker....

We also display two NTSC color wheel receivers at the convention, a Colordaptor and a Col-R-Tel

The difference between CBS and the Colrdaptor doesn't end with the flicker. Getting a set to pass the chroma on to a Col-R-Tel or Colordaptor can be difficult. The tri-stable switch can be touchy on the Colordaptor circuit, and all fine detail in the image is obliterated by a Col-R-Tel or Colordaptor. The CBS system is vastly superior to the Col-R-Tel or Colordaptor. It's simply much easier to get CBS color on a set than it is to get a Colordaptor working. I've tried both; my Colordaptor chassis is in a box of scrap, my 630TS has been modified for CBS rates and works flawlessly.

Any pictures you can post here? I'd love to see what your CBS-630TS looks like.

Also, if anyone wants tips and hints for converting a B&W NTSC set for use with a Colordaptor, I can provide that information. You can also purchase an inexpensive NTSC color converter unit from Aurora so you don't have to build or rebuild a Colordaptor chassis. You can build a color wheel with stage lighting gel that costs around $6 per sheet. Glad to help anyone who wants to build a color wheel set so you can see for yourself how great they look.

Here are a few photos under the chassis. While turning the set on its side the metal bracket for the top of the safety glass fell out of somewhere, a nice thing to find.

Max,

Thanks for the pictures! This is the most interesting set that has turned up on VideoKarma in a while.

I'm disorientated.

There is a whole bunch of black shielded cable that is not in a normal 630 set.

My 630TS is presently in safe storage and would be difficult to check at the moment, so I'm looking at both Sams and at my 8TS30 that appears to be relatively unmolested.

In you 2nd picture above, you have dual wafer switch with an extended shaft on it. Where does the extended shaft go and how is it labeled? Is it for sound or video or sync? Does it connect to the black "chicken head" knob in the below mentioned picture?

In your first post, the third picture shows a gold hammertone "project box" to the right of the chassis. Is that box attached to the chassis or was it just stuck in there with cables attached?

James

The wafer switch seen under the chassis is connected to the black knob on the rear, which is labeled "Video Sync", "Video", and "Normal". All of the black cables appear to have been added for the color wheel operation. Several connect to the connectors on the rear of the chassis and some enter the small additional "project box" chassis, which I haven't opened yet. I will try to remove the chassis in the future and take some additional detailed photos of the added wiring so this information can be preserved.

I was told at the sale this set was purchased from that the owner had worked for the IIT Research Institute in Chicago. Based on other items he had built that were at the sale and the collection of literature he owned it appears he had been quite knowledgeable about electronics.

I've taken Max's photo and placed it beside a photo of a stock KCS20A chassis and you can see the difference. A copy of the chassis stamp has been added to the comparison photo.

Since VideoKarma tends to squash very wide pictures, the picture has been rotated to a vertical with the hope of less compression. As shown, the back of the set is on the bottom and the CRT is on the top.

James