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Let's keep up this conversation and hear from people with differing points of view.
The following letter from Michael Bennett-Levy is posted on the Early Television Foundtation's website. It talks directly to the topic at hand.
Work once done cannot be reversed as a rule.
Pre-war TVs are very rare. To get one in to working order inevitably involves the replacement of some components, capacitors for a start. Modern capacitors are much smaller than old ones so one can hollow out the old ones and put the new ones inside them thus preserving the original look. Rewinding a transformer is probably acceptable but with both operations one has to 'put a soldering iron the set' and it is almost impossible to do so without leaving a trace - hence the restorer leaves a mark of his presence. Once a TV set is working then the tube has a limited life span. Pre- war tubes - especially the small ones suffer quite quickly from ion burn and replacement tubes are not plentiful to put it mildly. A set may work today with an acceptable brightness but then the set is 'only' sixty something years old and has probably not been used for fifty or more of them. What about when you and I are dead in another hundred years? What will be the historical importance of a pre-war TV set with many components changed and a burned out tube? Just as a piece of furniture design?
I've had a little over sixty pre-war TV sets through my hands since 1993. In all that number I only had two put in to working order (plus one that was already in working order from David Boynes). My experience in showing people my collection is that the experience is a mixture of nostalgia and historical and just seeing one pre-war set working for a few minutes crowns the experience for them. The analogy I think about is the Wright Brothers' Flyer in the Smithsonian in Washington. There it is hanging up the world's first powered aircraft still incredibly not yet even 100 years old! Presumably it could be got to work again and be flown but would one want to - for any reason? Thus it is with the TVs I possess. They are cleaned up as much as possible and mostly gleam - when dusted - but otherwise they remain many in the same electrical state as when they left their manufacturers.
Each person must make up his or her mind as to whether they want to put a pre-war TV in their possession back in to working order. I would not dream to criticize that choice, but for me I always tried to buy 'untouched sets' and sold on the less perfect duplicates (such luxury! Now alas gone). When Arnold Chase asked me which TRK 12/120 I wanted, (he had about eight or ten in varying states) my response was to ask him to send me the most 'untouched'. He did. It had sixty years of dust inside and outside of it.
If the tube in your Cossor has a burned out filament but is otherwise intact and with a bright white phosphor does it matter? It may be a blessing in disguise because in 100 years the phosphor will still be white and the insides perfect. For all I know one or two of the sets in my collection may have burned out filaments, but I'll never know at least until they leave my hands.
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