Philco 48-2500 Restoration Blog

[Eric H]

Success, after a couple false starts.

I took all the tubes with me today and tried firing the chassis up during my lunch hour, all I got was a glowing red plate on the 6BG6.

I messed around with it a little, pulling the cap off and seeing how much current it was drawing, anyway I fooled around a bit too much and cooked the 6BG6, it shorted and caused a little 50v cap on the Damper tube to explode.

fixed the cap and did a little troubleshooting around the Horiz Oscillator tube, I had zero B+, a little troubleshooting found a solder glob that had shorted a 120k resistor (R115 on the Sams) to an adjacent terminal on the strip, cleared that out and the voltages on the Osc tube fell in line.

Now that I knew it was probably working I went and borrowed a 6BG6 from a friend who lives near my work, put it in and fired it up.

The first indication that I had HV was the inch long spark that jumped from one of the doorknob caps to the second anode lead, the lead has a bad spot where I melted it with the heat gun.

Moved the lead, grounded the CRT more securely to the metal bench and tried again, this time I got a raster!

The raster fills the screen, I put in a set of tuner strips and it appears I'm getting something through the i.f strip, if I had a DVD player I think I could get a picture.

I used the CRT that came with the set, it was the most burnt so I figured I had the least to lose if something went wrong.

It works OK, decent brightness after it warms up a little but the area where the phosphors are burned are noticeably dimmer, there's also a barely noticeable vertical line burned in the screen, I think this is due to the way the set warms up, there's a brighter vertical line first then it expands and fills the screen, it could have had a horiz sweep failure at some time too I suppose.

There's also a faint image of Uncle Milty burned in the screen (just kidding but that would be cool)

Next I want to try my supposedly NOS TP400 and see if it actually works.