Rare prewar Westinghouse restoration

[Steve K]

About six months ago I had the opportunity to restore AK member Doug's RCA TT-5. Recently I finished his prewar Westinghouse which has a chassis identical to that of the TT-5. In fact, the front of the cabinet says RCA but all other labels identify it as a Westinghouse. I believe that this set is one of two known to exist.

This one was not in as good of condition as the TT-5. It had a tuner sub-assembly mounted under the chassis (seen in photo) and a switch mounted in place of the original on-off switch. The high voltage capacitor was missing but fortunately the original mounting bracket for it was under the chassis holding a much later capacitor. The focus shaft was broken off and the antenna terminal strip was replaced with a large coax connector.

I removed the added-on tuner chassis and restuffed all the caps and electrolytics. I thought that the high voltage winding on the power transformer was open and was trying to make a modern high voltage module to work when I found that the original xformer was good after all. The CRT was open but I bought a bunch of 5BP4s from Apex Surplus in LA. They were caked with mud but when I cleaned them up they all turned out to be RCAs and all produced as bright as a picture that a 5BP4 can produce.

The pictures are before and after shots of the chassis and the cabinet which has a pretty good original finish. The transformer is missing in the before picture because I removed it thinking that I would have to have it rewound.

Steve