captainmoody,
I know the feeling of having to make do with used stuff in the '70s--I did a lot of that back then. My first color TV was a second-hand Sears Silvertone roundie from 1964. Got it in 1970 from a man in my hometown who had had the set in his garage for years. The set needed very little to get it working again (the circuit breaker was bad, so I just bypassed it; then the push-pull power switch on the volume control went West, so I bypassed it as well). I was able to get all three network stations from Cleveland reasonably well on the attic-mounted antenna in my house at the time (and later on rabbit ears when I moved closer to town in 1972); however, I never did get the convergence right, even though I fiddled with it as long as I had the TV. Later on, I had a hum bar in the picture I couldn't get rid of, not to mention a problem with the color sync going out every now and then.
The set finally bit the dust for good in 1973, when the video-output tube socket broke out of one of the circuit boards.
I would not dream of taking the back off of my present RCA XL-100 19" color set, let alone tinkering with the circuitry. These modern sets are beyond my understanding, although I understood tube sets fairly well 30+ years ago.