[bgadow]

My Porthole!

This was actually the first "small-screen" tv I owned. Found it in an antique store in Baltimore, sometime in 1991-92. For me, at the time, this was a major find, though my then-girlfriend didn't think too highly of me spending 85 bucks on this instead of her! As found it had audio but I could never get any sign of hv. Back then all I knew was tube swapping & that didn't help. Later I handed it to a tv repairman who said he would check it out, but he never did. By the time I got it back, about 5 years ago, I was more adept at fixing things like this. I finally got swapping caps & resistors (and there were a ton of bad resistors in this machine) & finally got a raster, but this coincided with a loss of audio. When I later tried again I had lost the raster again! That was a year ago. Time to try again. I found that I had hv but on the low side (7900v) & I just could not find a reason for it. It ended up being really dumb. Awhile back I had put the tube tester on it & found the bottle very weak but after rejuvanation it worked fine. Well, when I tested it again it was back very weak. I ran it for a little while at 8v and when I dropped it back to 6 it was worse than before. The tube is just shot. I was able to finally get a dim raster, visible only with the lights off. Well, I had never reinstalled the 10BP4 in my 721TS (another long term project) so I popped that in-and had a perfect raster in short order! The sound still wasn't working but that got better with a screwdriver alignment & cleaning the volume pot. Its great to finally see (and hear) this Zenith. Now I need to find the contrast/volume knobs (I thought I had them when I got the set, which means they could be anywhere around here) and I need to find another crt to put in the RCA.

FYI, this is model 28T925R, chassis 28F20, from 1949. I need to do some research and see which President this one was named after! (that seems to be what all the porthole models were named after)