Restoring a Philco model E-3032

[Electronic M]

A couple summers ago the WARCI had a TV swap-meet and one of the sets I bought IIRC for $35 was this Philco. I really dig the styling of the cabinet. It is like 30's-40's scifi meets touches of the 50's. It is a local Milwaukee piece with the factory UHF tuner option. I was told it still worked by the seller and he was quite right! Aside from one whole period lytic can, a period replacement for a section of that same can (must have been a troublemaker), and some tubes this set is totally stock. Below are pictures of the cabinet, and it running on original parts.








It is remarkably compact for a 17" set with the classic deep low sweep angle CRT (I have a mid-50's RCA I should photograph it sitting on for comparison), but that compactness is a double edged sword...Part of the reason I waited to work on this set (besides it already working) was that I could not figure out how to remove the chassis. The chassis is bigger than the tube access hatch on it's back, and the neck length prevents any illusion of trying to rotate the chassis into leaving that route. I decided to remove the CRT cover and try removing JUST the CRT, and THAT was not practical either...The CRT and chassis must be removed as a unit, and there are lots of things holding that unit. Eventually I got it out and commenced the recap. Most of the tubular caps were leaking below 50V, and the CRT was testing BELOW 10% on my tester .... I'm not not sure HOW it even gave me the decent picture and sound on original parts that it did. In recognition of it's tenacity I cranked the CRT heater voltage up and let it cook/wake up, and commenced the recap. The CRT came up to marginal on the tester which given how well it did on almost NO emission should yield a nice bright picture...I'm not even going to bother using a brightener on this CRT.
After the recap I had no sound (thanks to a bad test speaker) until I tried another speaker. While goofing with that the vertical collapsed and fixed it's self.










This set is perhaps the least serviceable tube TV I've worked on...The chassis is harder to remove than the trio of GE 14T series I just finished, the set is mostly PCBs and all are bolted foil side to the chassis with no foil side access short of removing wires from the board and unbolting it....They use radial caps on the boards so you can't EVEN clip the caps out on the top of the board and J-hook new ones to the stubs like the GE 14T and RCA sets I've worked on! I can see why they designed them to never die like this one has...