Since I had some time today, I decided to pull the chassis out of the set. The idea was to use my LCR component tester to test some capacitors, if anything just for my own curiosity, see how well the caps in the high voltage areas have held up.
Oh hello sir! You look bulged!
That cap is a 4.7 uf @ 50 volt, and it's right by the Horizontal Output Transistor.
No... Did I really get this lucky? Is it that simple? Well lets pull it out and test it...
Annnd yyyyeeeaaaahhhh it's reading 39 pf on my tester. I'm gonna say that cap is bad.
Now this is interesting. I happen to have that exact same cap, and I mean the exact same:
I pulled the cap on the left out of a CTC 158 chassis, and it tests good. So lets pop it in and see what we get?
No change. Picture looks the same. Eh I didn't think it would be that easy anyway. However it would be nice to know what that capacitor does, because that was definitely a problem, if not the problem I'm chasing.