Westinghouse 22 inch color restoration

[Charlie]

That's awesome... absolutely awesome!!!



I gotta ask....the photo of the chassis underside... was that taken after you did your work??? Or is that a before shot?

[akent36]

Westinghouse probably made the best decision they could at the time. Between the tooling /setup charges at Corning Glass for an all new panel and funnel plus expenses tooling up the CRT plant, it would have been cost prohibitive. Apparently CBS-Hytron was months behind Westinghouse in development and was not yet in a position to share any tooling cost. Also, demand for color sets was low at the time due to lack of programming and there were high costs in purchasing and maintaining color sets. And if it is true that these tubes had to go through a overnight exhaust cycle (a typical cycle at the time was probably no more than three hours) it tells me that rejects were high, life test was poor, and CRT engineering could foresee no easy way to solve these problems, thus putting the cost per good tube out of sight. I have been in CRT engineering for over 36 years and have been in this same position. Believe me. It's no fun. I guess that's why they call it work.

[Steve D.]

Akent36,

I think that both you and John Folsom addressed the reasons that Westinghouse didn't persue futher developement of this tube quite accurately. Perhaps the right tube at the wrong time sums it up. The other factor that comes to mind is the long term reliability of this tube. While Steve K. has done a remarkable job in solving most of the convergence and purity problems, I wonder how this receiver and it's circuits, tuner, as well as the rectangular tube stood up as a daily watcher back in the 50's. Powered up for several hours each day for months may reveal short comings in picture quality and a very unhappy viewer dealing with multiple service calls. In this regard. Most of these 22" sets may have had a short life span. Westinghouse certainly would have known this very quickly and discontinued production and promotion of these sets in short order. While all early color sets required fairly frequent maintenance, the Westinghouse may have been even lower in reliability, over time, then most. I don't suggest putting this to the test. Keeping these sets in good, low hour, operating condition as long as possible should be the goal here.

-Steve .