1959 Motorola 21T64M

[Charlie]

This 1959 Motorola 21" table set is one I brought home from the TV shop recently. It's model number 21T64M, chassis TS-556. Cabinet is made of pasteboard (or particle board) with the fake photo finish on it. Has 16 tubes with the heaters run in series.

When I got this set home, the first thing I found was the 21CBP4 CRT was very weak. The next couple of times I went to the shop, I searched for other sets with the same toob to get a replacement. On the day Polaraman was here, I found the blonde Motorola pictured in the "TV Shop" thread. That CRT checked a little better, but was still on the weak side. Plus, the cap was pretty loose and the heater connection was intermittent. A few days ago, I found a Silvertone table set and hauled it home. The CRT in that one tested like new! I pulled the tube and will trash the rest of it.

I spent today taking apart the Motorola to see if it had any other troubles. Actually, the biggest trouble was taking it apart! The entire cabinet... top, bottom, front, and back all comes apart in different pieces to get to the chassis and tube!

I tried soft starting it with the HV offline, and got garbled audio. I let it run for a little while to see if anything was gonna blow. Nothing did, but, I found the main lytic under the chassis oozing snot out of it! The cans on top were running cool and showed no signs of ooze. Changing that one lytic didn't help the audio any, so, next thing to check was Motorola's notorious failing coils. Sure enough, I found one that was bad. Yanked one off the Silvertone chassis to replace it with, and now audio was clear as a bell.

After that, I brought HV back online. Seemed to be fine, but as suspected, I had a dim picture due to the weak CRT. Swapped out the tube with the Silvertone tube, and all brightened up nicely with a really good picture! Success!

I watched it for about an hour or so, and all was good. There was just a little shrinkage from one side of the screen... maybe a 1/2" at best... but other than that it played like a champ. Sometime later, I'll go thru it and see if I can get the shrinkage problem staightened out. For now, it's not serious enough for me to worry over.

The only chassis tube i changed was the 12DQ6 horz output... only because I broke the cap off when I went to disconnect it.