It's really hard to get the soot off the chassis. Several of my sets which I pulled from the burned house are still waiting to be cleaned up (20 years), since it's such a huge job. I saved a 7" Philco bakelite set (sadly was in mint condition and recapped), and I gave it to a friend up in Portland. I think he got it cleaned up enough to display, but wasn't able to get all the black & corrosion off the chassis. Here are pictures of two of those sets; the Philco and a 20" Kaye-Halbert Normandy which I saved. Looking at my pictures as compared to the Westinghouse set, I'm pretty sure about the theory that it was in a fire, and not just around smokers. My Philco still had it's knobs on it, but I had pulled them off before taking the picture because I had pulled the chassis to check what shape it was in underneath. The safety glass had cracked, but I think that was because the fire dept. had taken it off the shelf where it was, and it was dropped face-down. The paper decals were still OK. Go figure... My CT-100 was totally incinerated because it was upstairs. The Kaye-Halbert was in an upstairs room with the door closed, and the door didn't burn through right away. The door was open to the room where the CT-100 was.
Charles
And the miracle: The fire dept was able to save the big back room, which had over 200 early TVs in it. It's not right to thank God for material things, but this might be the exception! The bottom photo shows the outside of that room, which faced the fire, and the top shows how the heat and smoke was just starting to sneak through the top of the door and charred the door moulding, and melted the light switch plate. Another few minutes, or even seconds.......
