CT-100 as shipped from RCA
 

My CT-100 service manual (1st edition) says the 15GP was shipped in a separate carton. Seems somewhere else I read they were shipped complete. Do any of you know for sure?
Phil

Is that manual available online anywhere?

Regards,

Phil Nelson

Consensus is -- based upon that manual -- that Merrills were initially shipped sans CRT, but the practice was halted early.

Pete

I found that the easy way to tell whether any particular CT-100 was shipped partly assembled, is to look carefully at the bottom structure of the cabinet. The yoke and CRT mounting hardware was in a separate crate, and bolted inside the bottom of the cabinet in those sets. If there are bolt marks and recessed nuts in the holes in the bottom crossmembers, it was not assembled. If there are only clean drilled holes, it was shipped with the tube in-situ.

Charles

Is convergence easy to do on these sets? I don't think RCA would want to risk the quality issues stemming from badly done convergence done by novices in the field. As the CT100 was one of the first color sets released to the world, the average TV serviceman would be a novice to convergence.

I could see RCA shipping CRTs with yokes already mounted on them, and with the convergence circuitry connected up to it, as a single package. With the convergence adjustments already done at the factory. and in the field: "mount this board here, and connect these connectors here".

I doubt the jr. level tech would have been the one installing this at the customer's house. With how high the initial price was, and how much prestige would have been associated with owning the first color set I would think the installer would have sent their best.

-J

I'd love to see a copy of this manual. Does it have anything else that is additional/different from the 1954 RCA Television Field Service Manual reproduced in my CT-100 article? If so, it could be a useful document to share.

Regards,

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

I don't think that the CRT installation was left until the set arrived at the customer's house.
I remember when the first color TV arrived in our town. Word quickly spread that the RCA dealer had a COLOR TV! I went to the shop with my father, and for sure they had one! Since the shop in the back was pretty small, they had roped off an area on the sales floor to unpack and assemble the set. Indeed the set was face-down on a heavy furniture pad with no tube and no top. My father asked why they were replacing the tube in a brand new set, and we were told that it was shipped that way because color tubes were more fragile than B/W tubes.
It seemed like it took them weeks to get the set operating properly (but, then what is the time scale to an impatient little kid). I remember that they used a pattern generator that looked "unfinished" in that the tubes were visible when they were using it.
jr

My guess is that the dealer put the tube in if necessary, then went through alignment for practice even if the tube had been installed at the factory. Then, if I were a customer paying that much, I would appreciate getting the complete tech show at home as the set was adjusted a third time. A savvy tech, after impressing the new owner with the complexity, would also make it clear that he stood ready to return and fix any problems, and maybe hint that those might occur often enough to make a service contract a very good idea.

Every time you moved one of these sets, the convergence was out anyway, so much better the service tech had practiced in his shop before he had to do it in the customer's house.


I strongly suspect that RCA had production problems with getting enough CRTs made to meet the promised delivery date. The big lump of a TV set had to ship via freight, while the smaller CRT could travel much faster.


Legend has it that the 15 inch color CRT early production had more rejects than good tubes. As soon as RCA had the larger CRTs in production, no more 15 inchers were built and these early rejects were used to fulfill the 7 year requirement for replacement parts.

James.

Yeah, several of the first Bar - Dot generators, especially the ones made by B&K were in a black suitcase, and when you opened suitcase to use it, the chassis inside was topless. It had more tubes in it than the average B&W TV!

The first shop in Atlanta that I worked in had one of these and the running joke was they made it this way so it would be easier to change the tubes. We spent more time working on that pile of junk than using it. Tube counting circuits get real problematic if the tubes get bounced about while doing service calls.

It was replaced with tiny solid state battery operated unit in 1959 and that unit was trouble free unless someone forgot to turn it off and the next day the battery would be kaput. At the time the battery was a non-standard battery, which was only stocked by the manufactuer.

Jas.

My Riders manual has the original CT100 service manual that shows the CRT was shipped separately. I wasn't surprised, as RCA used to do that with their early B&W sets. Didn't RCA service company maintain those sets the first year, no matter who sold them.

Considering that the earlier color sets did not have automatic degaussing and that the sets were very susceptible to convergence and purity changes when just moving the sets across the room or even rotating them on axis, the installation of the CRT on site makes sense.

Terry

If you think the CT100 setup was bad try to set up the TK-40/41 cameras for same set.

A survivor tech from the era told me that the cams had to be oriented magnetically north/south for initial registration and setup.

It was a wonder that color made it home.

That seems like an urban myth to me. I worked with the TK-41's back in the 60's & early 70's. This includes KTLA receiving one of the last of the TK-41C's in 1966. I don't recall that anyone ever cared what direction the camera was pointed in during registration and set up. These were quality, well built cameras, very durable in studio and on remotes. They always produced a damn good color picture.

-Steve D.