Quote:
Originally Posted by peverett
I would not expound too much on quality of the cabinets of early TVs. Some of these, especially B&W sets, were made of cheap masonite even in the mid 1950s. Cheapness has a long history.
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Good grief! And all this time I thought that Zenith on eBay was in a solid wood cabinet. Oh well, this is nothing new, as even in the 1930s the cabinets of Zenith radios were not high-quality wood; rather, they were hardwood or particle board with, believe it or not, pictures of quality wood such as mahogany, cherry, etc. on heavy paper, which was then glued onto the cheap wood cabinet. The process was known as "photo finish" and was a lot less expensive than housing the radio in a real wood cabinet.
I have a Zenith MJ-1035 stereo FM radio that is supposed to have a solid mahogany cabinet (the same radio was also available in a blonde cabinet), but I think that so-called "mahogany" is simply a pressed-on veneer over either cheap wood or a genuine blonde finish. I say this because a very small piece of the so-called mahogany veneer has chipped off the cabinet at the lower right front corner, exposing what appears to be a blonde finish. My set was made in 1965; was Zenith cutting corners on radio or TV cabinets even that late in the game? Since the MJ1035 sold for just a nickel under $200 when it was new in the early sixties (this series began as the MJ1035, in 1961; the two later models, MJ1035-1 and -W1, appeared in '64-'65), I would expect that the cabinets would be solid furniture-grade mahogany, not a hardwood or cheap-wood cabinet over which a paper-thin mahogany veneer was applied.
OTOH, if Zenith (and other manufacturers) were putting their televisions and stereo consoles in cheap masonite cabinets in the '50s going forward, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised if my MJ1035
does have a mahogany veneer cabinet. As you said, cheapness has a long history; but again, good grief--why would pre-Goldstar Zenith (1918-1989) let themselves get sucked into this trend? Zenith televisions, radios and stereos were, after all, some of the best sets available in the company's heyday until the '70s, when they started using a lot of plastic in their television cabinets (don't let those so-called "wood" accent pieces over the speaker grilles in '70s Zenith console TVs fool you; those accents are thin, brown-color plastic things that will break or crack if too much pressure is brought to bear on them). Cheapness is one of the last things I would have expected from Zenith. If that set on eBay is actually in a cheap masonite cabinet rather than a solid wood one, I will be amazed, as I honestly do not think Masonite is anywhere nearly strong enough to hold a heavy TV chassis such as is in that particular model.
Speaking of plastic in Zenith equipment: Zenith made a heck of a mistake in the late '30s-'40s when they introduced a small 4-tube table radio with the inverted bakelite chassis. As I understand from reading about this radio, it was a nightmare to work on, and in the end most of the sets were recalled by Zenith and smashed to bits. I don't know how many of these radios were sold, but due to the recall they are very scarce today, not even showing up on eBay very often.