Wonderful score today

[Dave S]

A friend went to a estate sale yesterday and sent out an email afterward to everyone in our club that there was "an old TV with a 3-inch screen in rough shape" there if anyone was interested. It was only a few miles from my house, so figuring that I could always use another Pilot set or postwar TV-school kit set if the price was right, I took a ride over. I got there several hours after the start of the last day of the sale and the place was looking pretty picked over.

Instead of a Pilot I found this Andrea 1-F-5:



If I had seen this last week, it might have caused me to have a heart attack! Fortunately this week I was prepared for my heart to be pounding in my ears as I went back upstairs to negotiate a price.

New Jersey may have it's faults (Bridgegate anyone?) but it continues to be possible to trip over fabulous old TVs here.

-- Dave Sica

[cwmoser]

Nice. Show us some more pictures.

Carl

[truetone36]

Wow! I haven't seen a prewar set in the wild since the late 70's. I often wonder how many such sets are sitting in basements, attics and barns just waiting to be found.

[bandersen]

Incredible find I would flip out for sure if I came across one.

[Dave S]

Originally Posted by cwmoser

Nice. Show us some more pictures.
Carl

This is all I've got right now (it's still living in my car):

[David Roper]

THAT is...wow, incredible! Congratulations!

[Paul Knaack]

Congratulations, Great way to start 2014!

[Reece]

Wow, what a find. I guess that's got one of those bang, you're dead high voltage supplies?

[bandersen]

There's good info on your set including a schematic here: http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...andrea/1f5.htm

[Electronic M]

Holy cow!...That puts a lot of dreams of major finds back in my head.

Congrats on your find!

What kind of future do you have planned for it?

[Jon F]

Awesome!

[decojoe67]

Another amazing find. On the ARF someone posted on finding a '39 RCA TT5! it proves incredible finds are still not impossible.
ETF says less than 25 have been accounted for. It's a must for this set to carefully and professionally restored. It is totally worth the investment. You have a set that is worth $5,000-$10,000. You struck gold!
It will be so great to see this set be brought back to this:

[Dave S]

Originally Posted by Reece

Wow, what a find. I guess that's got one of those bang, you're dead high voltage supplies?

Yeah, I actually had to look it up because I wasn't sure but it's a 60-cycle "brute force" high voltage supply. It's "only" 2,500 volts but at 60 Hz, I hear that should be more than enough to kill you. Even the DC high voltage with what looks on the schematic like it should have a fair amount of current available behind it wouldn't be something I'd want to tangle with.

[vts1134]

Great find . Seeing a prewar "in the wild" sure takes your breath away on the first glance doesn't it? Seeing one with a $75 price tag is pretty nice too.

[Joe Connor]

I'm glad that set went to Dave because he's a good guy and will put it to good use.

It's weird how treasures like this come to light. This sale was in an affluent area and the only advertisement was on estatesales.net. The ad listed, among other things, amateur radio equipment. There were no pictures and no mention of an antique TV.

I was there early on the first day of the sale. From the odds and ends in the basement, you could see that the owner was a ham and a tinkerer but it appears that the stuff had been cherry-picked before the sale. For example, the only SW or ham receiver on the premises was a rusty old Coast Guard VLF receiver from WWII. There was a transmitter but it was home-brew, seven feet high and weighed a ton. I can't imagine how you could remove that monster. (I would have loved to have the rack that the transmitter was mounted in because I could have fit at least a half-dozen boatanchors in it!)

There wasn't a lot of super-old stuff in the rest of the house so it doesn't appear that the home owner had been the original owner of that pre-war TV. It would be interesting to know how he came to own it. Just to add to the weirdness of the entire scene, this guy also owned a huge modern flat-screen TV. He had audio equipment, too, but it was Realistic stuff, not high-end stuff.

By the way, this article states that only 17 of the Andrea 1F5 sets are known to have survived. I guess Dave's is No. 18.

http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...andrea/1f5.htm

Joe Connor