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Back in '97, I received a phone call from the head of maintenance at the local Motel 6. He said they were in the process of getting new TV's and that he had 20 19" GE's. He said that most of them worked; but, not that great. He went on to say that the manager told him to get rid of them. He sold them to me for $5/each and they were all "PC" chassis sets with the standard two-knob mechanical tuner. I fixed 19 out of the 20 and sold them for anywhere between $40-$75/each. A lot of them had weak CRT's; but, most of them rejuvenated well. Most of the other problems were caused by the usual bad capacitors in the vertical and power supply circuits. A few months later, he called me to say that he had more TV's available; but, the place was under new ownership and they had different ideas on the pricing. He said they were thinking $50/each and I declined.
One you want to stay away from is the 25" Panasonic-built GE's. Every one of those that I saw had a weak CRT, bad flyback, and/or numerous bad connections on the chassis. IIRC, the flyback part number was TLF14423F. Those sets were made around '85-'86, in both table and console models. I never really cared for the picture on them, even when they worked right.
There was also a BC chassis, used in 13" and 17" sets of the '83-'84 time period. This chassis was also made by Panasonic. It had a decent picture; but, flyback transformers loved to go up in smoke in them.
Right before the end, there was an MK chassis 19" set (available in knob tuned versions and digitally tuned remote versions) that was also made by Panasonic. I don't recall seeing too many bad flyback transformers in this one; but, there was an orange HV disc capacitor that connected between the collector of the HOT and ground that would short and burn. The CRT's often didn't last long in these, either. After this chassis, everything pretty much shifted to Thomson and used a CTC-xxx chassis.
Panasonic made good VCR's for GE; but, they should have stayed away from building their TV's.
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