My First antique tele restoration!!!1
 

At a antique shope today and say this tv sitting behind the counter just sitting there pluged in and humming away with its bad filter caps so i bought the "broken set" for 45.00 at least i know the audio kinda works. Since i got it this afternoon i have cleaned all of the pots removed all of the grease from the inside (must have been next to a deep fryer all of its life.) and i just finnished making a list of all the capacitors i need.
:thmbsp:

What brand/model is it. Will you be able to post pictures ?

sorry, i forgot to upload the photos just a minit and i put some up. it has no model number only a chassis number.

Good luck and more details please. I've been to numerous antique shops in Chicago and they've all been clueless about their radios and TVs for sale.

here. the chassis isnt to cramped underneath also where could i buy the caps nowhere seems to have the right value.

Anyone know where i can get a schamatic?

Sam's technical publishing's website should have it, though is not necessarily the cheapest source. The hum could be video related rather than bad lytics.......Zenith used some darned good lytics in the 50's-70's. If the lytics run cool after the set has been on an hour or so, and putting a new cap in parallel with the existing lytics yields no improvement then I'd leave the lytics alone. Instead I'd focus on the paper, molded plastic, and tubular ceramic caps which are not as good at this point in their lives.

Zenith sets tend to out live most other brands......I've got older Zeniths that still work on original caps so if you had a watchable picture on the screen I would not be the least bit surprised.

Those 60ish year old lytics not shorting out and frying your power transformer is a gamble you're willing to make. I definitely discourage recommending anybody make the same gamble without making very clear what the stakes are: black smoke and loss of costly and hard to find components if you lose.

This article has info about identifying old caps and ordering replacements:

http://antiqueradio.org/recap.htm

Do yourself a favor and replace the electrolytics as David advised.

For TV restorations, I get most parts from http://www.mouser.com/ and http://www.justradios.com/ .

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

I am not willing to make the Gamble with these caps because i know they could go today or in 20 years.
phil, I dont even know if i can count how many times i have read over your site before doing a radio repair its really been alot of help.:thmbsp:

Zenith only made two years of sets with the upright chassis. I think the technicians complained about them being hard to work on. You had too much disassembly to troubleshoot and replace parts. After that, they advertised, their sets were the ones that most technicians prefered.:yes:

Its nice to see another whos just getting into these. Listen to what these guys say, its saved me from some costly mistakes.

Right.

I found one shorted 'lytic in my DuMont set that killed the power transformer, but never leaked tar or anything. I doubt that it even smoked.

Not sure if you are aware of this, but the whole chassis/crt bezel assembly comes out through the front of the cabinet. There will be some screws behind the safety glass nameplate, behind the large knobs and some at the rear top and bottom. My set is the slightly newer 17Z22Q chassis with the space command remote. My main power supply cap on was blistering/leaking. Minus the safety glass and knobs with the screws removed, lay the set on it's face and lift off the cabinet. Don't forget those speaker wires!

Howard Sams covers the 17Y20 chassis in Photofact 335-19.

Forgot to mention. Instead of restuffing the original P/S cap I found a simular value by doubling the terminals together. I needed an 80/40uf@400V/60uf@50Volt. I bought a replacement 40/40/20/20@425V, paralled the values together and hung seperately the 60@50V. As for the smaller C2 cap I restuffed that one as it's in a tight spot minus the cathode capacitor value for the audio output. Simple!