Estate Sale Finds In 2008!

[bgadow]

An update on the Magnavox: I finally got enough junk cleared out of the way to bring the set inside. When I first plugged it in I was struck by the loud hum of the remote chassis. The set powered up but with a weak raster and no reception. I pulled the back and found the following: the tuner is a Rube Goldberg design. It uses a regular old click-stop tuner (with a knob hidden behind a secondary door) plus a limited number of UHF presets. The tuner is motor driven, as is the volume control. The tuner display isn't really LED-the segments are lit, apparently, by individual subminiature lamps. One is intermittent and one appears to be burnt out. The dust cover is missing from the tuner; I cleaned it but that had no effect on reception. The video module seems looser than it should be; I cleaned the contacts and put it back. The CRT is weak, but not dead. I ran it for an hour or so at 8v and that helped. Another more pressing problem is that there is arcing in the focus control circuit. One end of the pot goes to ground through a resistor and the wiper has a spark gap to ground. I'm getting a steady blue spark at the ground end, which I don't understand. Someone had unhooked the sparkgap, and hooking it back up basically killed the set, so I undid it again.

I don't know that I will put much more time into this. Maybe I'll give it until the end of the month and if nobody shows any interest I'll just junk it. The gimmicks are nice, but it is a largish set. One more thing: my stepmother kept commenting about how nice the cabinet is and how they just don't make things like that anymore. What she doesn't know: the cabinet is about 75% plastic, with most of the rest being particle board. As expensive as this set had to have been when new, I'm not sure it has any solid wood anywhere on it.