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Old 10-22-2013, 12:02 PM
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Jeffhs Jeffhs is offline
<----Zenith C845
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Fairport Harbor, Ohio (near Lake Erie)
Posts: 4,035
That Silvertone metal-cabinet roundie Electronic M has reminds me of a set I had in the early 1970s. Mine was almost exactly identical to his (except for the push-pull volume control and power switch), but I had all sorts of trouble with it. I got the TV from someone in my old neighborhood; when I got the set home, I found a bad circuit breaker. I jumped the breaker (was just starting in TV servicing at the time--besides, I did not have a replacement handy); that got the set working, and in fact I had a picture and sound after that, but I was never able to get the convergence right.

I fooled with the set for three years, trying one thing after another to get it to work as it should, then things started going wrong. First, the color sync went bad, although I could get it to lock by turning the tint control back and forth a few times. Then the video output tube (I think) developed a heater-cathode short, putting a hum bar in the picture. The video output tube socket cracked out of the board when I tried to replace the tube (the only replacement I could find had a bent pin); this ruined the set. I've been wary of PC boards in televisions (or any other electronic device) ever since.

I left that roundie behind when I moved in 1975, and replaced it the following year with another Sears rectangular color set which was actually built by Toshiba; that one was followed by a long string of color and b&w sets, all used. However, I don't miss the roundie one bit. Those phenolic-based PC boards may have been good when they were new, but after a few years of being subjected to heat from tubes and such, they became so brittle that changing tubes became a real problem--the least bit of pressure on a tube socket would crack the board, all too often ruining it. I would not dream of touching the PC modules in my flat screen TV (or either of my late-model CRT sets) these days.
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Jeff, WB8NHV

Collecting, restoring and enjoying vintage Zenith radios since 2002

Zenith. Gone, but not forgotten.
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