| Jeffhs |
03-14-2010 01:29 PM |
That Maggie looks great -- an excellent save. IMHO, it looks much too nice to be sitting in your basement. Are you considering moving it into your living room once you overhaul it? :scratch2:
BTW: My favorite brand of TVs, radios, and stereo gear was and still is Zenith (I have several vintage Zenith radios here), but I like the styling of the Magnavox consoles as well. I'd love to have one, but my apartment is much too small. I'm sure I'd need a living room the size of the state of Texas to accomodate a console the size of yours.
The only thing I don't like about Maggies is that they use PC boards, which get brittle over time. I've had a "thing" against PC boards ever since the video output tube socket in my 1964 Sears Silvertone roundie color set broke out of the board -- the irony is that the set was only six years old (I got it from one of my neighbors in my hometown in 1970).
I had to get rid of the set after the board cracked; ever since then I've been extremely leery of anything with tubes (especially high-power ones that run hotter than the dickens) that uses circuit boards. I've often wondered why the video output PC board in my TV broke the way it did. Were circuit boards of the 1950s-'60s made of a different type of material (i. e. phenolic) than are today's boards? I realize PC boards do get brittle with age, but I can't believe the 6AW8 video output tube could get so hot, even in normal operation, that it baked the area around its socket to a crisp in only six years. :scratch2: The set probably would have lasted longer than it did had I not had to replace that 6AW8, or if the tube I replaced it with didn't have a bent pin.
I remember reading somewhere (maybe it was in a post to this forum) that the area around the horizontal output tubes in Magnavox consoles, especially the fabulous 3-way stereo theatres of the late '60s, got so hot that the sockets cracked through the boards after only a year or two. Did Magnavox's design engineers ever cure that problem before these sets went out of production by the end of the sixties? For that matter, did Magnavox use metal chassis in any of their TVs? If not, IMHO, I think they should have, taking a page or two from Zenith's book. The sets would have lasted longer and there would have been no problems with cracks on PC boards, especially large ones around high-power tube sockets which are probably darn near impossible to repair--requiring that the entire board be replaced. I know a lot of small TVs were built all on one circuit board as late as the '70s, but that was for reasons of economics. However, I would never have expected a respected company such as Magnavox to make such widespread use of PC boards in its televisions of the '60s, especially in areas such as the horizontal output stage which normally run much hotter than the rest of the set.
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