[ohohyodafarted]

As most of you probably know I am working with John Folsom on the 15GP22 rebuild project.

We are currently attempting to resolve an issue with cracking 20 pin glass stems used to mount the gun.

In our efforts to determine what the problem is, with respect to our stems cracking, I decided to send a stem remnant that was removed from a dud color crt, to our stem manufacturer for him to examine and see if he could find a way to redesign the 20 wire stem we are having trouble with.

OK so I decided to send our stem maker the glass stem remenant from the
21axp22 gun that was removed, prior to rebuilding the crt for the 21CT55. Upon removing the gun and the base socket, I discovered a very odd thing. The stem used to mount the gun was not a 14 wire stem as one would expect, but rather a 20 wire stem. It is the exact same type 20 wire stem used on all the 15GP22 crt's.

I would assume that RCA probably produced a surplus quantity of 20 wire stems, that were left over at the end of the 15GP22 production run, and so at the beginning of the production run for the 21AXP22's, RCA decided to use up the surplus 20 wire stems that were made for the 15GP22 crt's.

The 21axp22 in this 21ct55 set, had a date code of 52 week of 1954, so it was indeed an early production original 21AXP22.

Just a little bit of additional curious information on the early color crt's

Bob