[bgadow]

January 1st was a good day. It all started many months ago, when colortrakker posted that he had a Portacolor in need of some TLC, looking for a home. I had hoped to be in his neighborhood a month or so ago but it took until now to get up to Allentown. We had a great talk-good people find their way to AK! Anyway, the Portacolor turns out to be the exact model I bought earlier this year. Maybe that will make it easier to fix! A clean one, anyhow. (1974 model, I think)
Now, its not that I don't think a Portacolor is worth a 3-hour drive, but I really did want to find something else to do on the trip. Before Christmas I said, what the heck, lets do an ebay search-wouldn't it be funny if something in PA turned up that I could pick up on the same trip? So I do my usual search for "antique television" (I never buy anything-just look to pass time) and guess what is first on the list, with 18 hours left, no bids, opening at $1? An RCA color roundie! Next day, it was mine. The seller said she had tried to get rid of it several times but nobody would ever show up. I gave her $15 because I thought that was fair, considering what she had to go through.

I knew from her description that the set was not working. I wasn't home long, of course, before I started digging in to it. Problem #1, one of my favorites! Bad power switch. Of course it didn't work! While doing the soft-start I pulled the horiz. output & it didn't look so healthy so in went a NOS tube. With the full power-up I got a raster, but no focus. A new 1V2 solved that. With some tinkering I got barber poling; a new 6GH8 cured that. The color is off but I think it will come around. Now I have to do the cataract surgery, the first time I have really done this. (I don't count the crt in my CTC-15 as it really did fall off when I untaped it) The local tv repairman just gave me a tube caddy full of NOS controls/switches, so maybe there will be a new switch in there. I almost forgot, this is a CTC-12. Notice how similiar it is to Cory's Silvertone...maybe the biggest difference in the layout is mine has a smoke lens over the VHF dial instead of a clear window. The set is pretty dusty inside & has not seen a new tube in a long time. The crt is an RCA, can't say for sure if its the original. Not the strongest I've seen but not bad.