"New" RCA TRK-12
 

An RCA Victor TRK-12 found it's way to Pittsburgh this week. After much heavy lifting and effort it is in its new home in my basement. I can't believe how heavy these suckers are! This particular TRK-12 sat, bolted to the original shipping crate bottom, unsold in a closed department store for over 70 years. At some point the store had RCA perform the postwar tuner upgrade to adjust the channels from 1-5 to 2-6. When the store closed I suppose they decided it was too heavy and worthless to do anything with. I guess you could say I'm the "original owner" of this set :banana:.

http://i1075.photobucket.com/albums/...psoxjy7sgt.jpg

I'm so used to seeing vintage sets with moisture damage to the bottoms that I found myself laughing when I saw the bottom of this set.

http://i1075.photobucket.com/albums/...psukb09m1j.jpg

http://i1075.photobucket.com/albums/...psbrpx02vc.jpg

I couldn't resist powering the amplifier up with a fused variac, slowly raising the voltage over a couple of hours. The original electrolytics barely gave an audible hum over the next hour or so as I rubbed a coat of wax into the finish and listened to big band favorites through its original 75 year old components. Quite a treat!

Once in a lifetime (if very lucky) find!

Congratulations.

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Congratulations John! Truly the "FIND OF THE CENTURY"

Please make additions to this thread as you make additional discoveries.

Incredible! What a fitting "first use" with the big band music.

Be sure and remember to fill out and mail in the warranty card in the next three months. :D

Holy cow! That set is in unbelievable condition. :jawdrop:

[edit] Does anyone know how long the department store kept that set on the display floor, before they tucked it aside? It's hard to imagine how it stayed so nice being in an abandoned building so many years.

You know that kept going through my head last night! I was hoping to to find an original warranty card and manual hiding inside it somewhere to display with the set.

Zounds!! Is there such a category as "better than museum quality?"

There may never again be such a pristine example of this set. I'm often the first to start replacing components to make a set work as new, but in this case I might be tempted to leave everything untouched. It can only be original once, as the saying goes.

Do you mind sharing how you found this set?

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

How did the store manage to stay empty yet undistrubed for 70 years? That's incredible, look forward to seeing more of it !

My word! a truly jaw dropping find! It is amazing that it could have been sitting undiscovered and undamaged for so long. Congratulations!

jr

Spectacular find! This has to be one of the best, if not the best example in existence!

Do you know if the CRT is still good? Don't see why it wouldn't be.

Hands down, that's the best original example of this classic and historic TV in existence. It was quite a treat just to see the photos! You're quite privileged to be the caretaker of it. Enjoy!

Very rare, beautiful work of wooden art, totally original, and NEW. Absolutely amazing!

Dave

Yah, that's pretty cool..... I think I would not touch anything inside....
If the sound part works, I bet the picture part does too....
Crank that sucker up !

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What a beautiful work of art!

Outstanding! How were you alerted to the set?

Sadly no. There are quite a few more components between antenna in and the kinescope than there is between phono in and the speaker. The kinescope's filament does light but a lack of raster suggests no high voltage. I didn't wait around at full voltage for more than a minute to troubleshoot, I didn't want to press my luck. I figured if it wanted to work it would have done so. It's seen enough excitement for a while. I think I'll allow it to retire again for a short time, this time in loving appreciative hands.

Wow! Talk about showroom clean! Incredible find. :drool::drool:

WOW!!! WOW!!! WOW!!!:thmbsp:

Great find. All the good sets are back east.

Simply amazing. I would love to hear the story about how it survived all those years in an abandoned department store!

Fantastic! Did you end up making the drive?

Wow, Wow,Wow to infinity-lol!

Wow.... You are TRULY "A LUCKY Dawg..." (grin)

The Chicago area ALSO seems to hold a lot of good stuff...too !!

WOW!

It would be very cool to get this set running with minimal component changes.

One thing you could try on the electrolytics is a reforming technique that has been circulating the vintage guitar amp and audio world for several years now. This link describes the technique, but the jist of it is you add a 2 watt 100k resistor right before the power supply caps (basically in series with the B+) and then measure the voltage drop across this resistor. Some caps may only take a half hour to reform, some may take a day, and some may simply not be savable. That said, this should also be also be used along with a variac for safety, but with the inline resistor trick your caps (if savable) can be reformed in a self regulating manor. In this case you would remove all the tubes (I'd suggest a plug in solid state tube rectifier replacement for the power up) and keep the main AC down a bit with the variac since the power supply may go a bit higher than normal without the tubes in the circuit. You don't want to exceed the voltage rating of the caps! Anyway it's a cool trick and as I mentioned self regulating, as opposed to slowly working up a variac over time which is still a guessing game.

http://forum.metroamp.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8396

That's a neat idea for equipment in which there's no ohmic load on the B+ supply with all the tubes removed.
But in TVs of this vintage, there's often bleeder/divider resistors of less than 20K across the B+.
With the forming voltage supplied through a 100K resistor, the caps would never see but a fraction of their rated voltage.

I figured that would be the case. Still, you could isolate each cap to reform. That said, perhaps this is a TRK-12... perhaps THE TRK-12 that needs to simply be preserved in "as found" condition. I couldn't leave it alone though, I'd want to see it "alive"!

I'd have it on my repairman's bench the next day. No way I could leave any of these classic sets as static displays. It was designed to televise and still should be doing so.

This score is about as good as finding a Guttenberg bible in an old trunk in yr Mamaw's house.. Or stumbling over a "Patent Motorenwagen" in the barn. Wonder how many lines per the CRT its set up for ? 441?

Congratulations on your fantastic find.

-Steve D.

I wouldn't try to reform the caps, I'd replace them, maybe restuff them. If you can see the heater in the CRT light up, it likely still has vacuum. Still need to find out if the flyback, yolk, and other unobtanium items are all good. Probably a ton of wax caps to replace...


I don't suppose the warranty is any good, even if you are the original owner and you just bought it from the store... :D

My TRK12's electrolytic caps were bad, very very bad.

THAT has got to be one of the top-tier finds EVER!

You didn't ask, but here's my 2-cents: a totally original set is one of the few examples of the type of mass-produced artifacts we collect that deserves to stay totally original. Please consider leaving it 100% factory stock original, even if that means it will never work. Lots of other sets work. Stratospherically few are 100% original.

-- Dave Sica

Many years ago I remember going to the estate sale of a book collector who's family had a find like the former...I don't remember if the book was a bible or what, but it apparently was a very old book put out by the church, and the church had put a scrap of Mary's clothing in the book...

From what I understand for most pre-war sets the scan rate conversion was as simple as turning the horizontal hold control till the sync locked. IIRC the OP said the tuner had been converted to a postwar type so it was probably last used with late 40's-50's NTSC. The sound conversion might be interesting...Pre-war sets were AM sound modern sets are FM sound. IIRC some prewar sets could be adjusted to work with no circuit changes. If the AM IF has the right bandwidth you can tune it so that the frequency of one audio peak is at the peak of the IF response curve, and the frequency of the audio valley is outside of or on the lower ragged edge of the IF response curve....This makes the IF response curve convert a varying frequency to a varying amplitude that an AM detector circuit can make into sound.

I guess you have to debate the tuner conversion history to decide if it is factory original as converted or later in the home and not factory. In the factory...leave it as is? In the home...corrections have been made and more conversions do not change history? This set was never in a home. Did it arrive at the store already converted?

I do not know when RCA did the conversions on either the 12 or the 120. My 120 has the conversion. Just asking.

The tuner conversion consisted of realigning the coils and putting new decals on, if I remember correctly.

You sure you want to keep that in your basement? In that condition, I'd move it into the living room.

I've been in his basement. It's like a first class museum :)

Sorry for not replying in a while. I don't mean to abandon the thread. My son Enzo was born on Saturday and I've been busy and very sleep deprived since then. I am in contact with the original store owner's grandson and will be getting as much history as possible soon, I just have to sleep for more than 90 minutes at a time first.

Congratulations on the birth of your son!!