[maxhifi]

My CTC-38 was only serviced by an RCA authorized dealer, and had all RCA tubes in it still. When I got it, the picture would come on for about 5 minutes, and then totally lose sync. I swapped the AGC and the Sync tubes, and the picture stays in sync but is a bit less sharp than before I swapped tubes.

I tested all the tubes and the bad one is a little bit weak, and has a white RCA logo versus the red one of the replacement tubes, so it is original to the set. I also replaced one of the 6GH8s in the colour section which had bad heater/cathode leakage with a used good Admiral tube I had laying around.

My plan is to wait for a rainy day, pull the chassis, and replace all the electrolytic capacitors, plus the formerly Sync now AGC 6GH8A and the one in the colour section where I put in the used Admiral tube. Now that I have the Sams for the set (thank you, zeno!) I can see there's a decent list of capacitors needing replacement, but not too many.

This TV actually lives in the living room, and is used as my primary TV for family entertainment - I posted a thread on it in the rectangular tube tv section a while back. It's really got a nice picture, aside from a slight waviness probably due to aged capacitors. Reliability is somewhat important, since it's my main TV set, but on the other hand I don't expect perfection out of a 46 year old TV... I also have a spare junk chassis for it, but no spare yoke or CRT.

Interestingly all of the horizontal tubes - the horizontal output, the damper, the high voltage rectifier, are RCA replacements with a 1970 date code all marked "Japan", I didn't know RCA was sourcing tubes from Japan so early on!