Show us your vintage B&W sets!

[Eric H]

I just returned from a short road trip to pick up this two tone RCA 17", 17-PD-8096 I think it is, I already have one just like this but for $40 with a stand I couldn't pass it up.

It was about 100 miles round trip including a couple side trips for lunch and Coffee, the home was a 5500 sq ft mini-mansion in a gated community in Chino, A million dollars if it's a penny. even in So Cal that's a nice house.

Anyway, the set is in decent shape and came with an age appropriate stand, not an RCA part but perfect for the set, it's missing one small knob and the gold V emblem on top is broken but I may have a knob and I do have a V so that's not a big problem.

Powered it up and the tubes light but it's totally dead otherwise, no sound or light.

I'll pull the back and check the CRT next but even if it's bad I have a NOS spare for it.

[Eric H]

Originally Posted by Eric H

I'll pull the back and check the CRT next but even if it's bad I have a NOS spare for it.

Good news, the CRT checks like new!

This is a series string set with an 8.4 volt CRT, my luck withe them has been 50/50 but this one checks 95/100, even with the heater reduced to less than 6 volts it stays at 95! Cutoff is good too.

[Steve D.]

Good going Eric,

Looks like a nice clean example w/a good crt. And ez to transport. That knob should be fairly easy to find, although that is not a common color.

-Steve D.

[Tubejunke]

Originally Posted by Steve D.

Good going Eric,

Looks like a nice clean example w/a good crt. And ez to transport.

-Steve D.

I just had to tell this story if I haven't before about transporting one of these. As a latch key kid I was put on an airplane every summer to spend time with my mom. One summer around 1981 I found one of these while yard sale hunting with my mom down in Alabama. I think I gave $5 for the almost mint working set. Almost meaning that it had a tendency to get vertical roll.

In those days 50s sets were quite common and sort of considered junk for the most part. But this space age rocketship design to me was 'over the top' and I loved it. So I could not allow myself to be separated from it upon going back to old Virginnie. So on the day of my flight home I carried that RCA right on that plane! There was even enough room in the area above the seat to hold it! I sure did, and I remember someone helping me get the thing up on the cargo shelf and oddly I don't remember getting any hairy eyeball looks. Of course in those days I think people still didn't look at television as some sort of birthright; actually it was still more of a small investment worth repairing. Certainly not a throw away item; not yet. And for sure we didn't carry them around in our pockets like everyone is doing these days.

Anyway, in today's paranoid air terrorism scene I just bet this scenario would raise every red flag in the book in an airport. Heck, the security people probably wouldn't know that it's a TV first off. Just the built in rabbit ears would certainly be the makings of a bomb and rightly so. You could probably make a deadly weapon out of an old set in a hundred ways. Seems I didn't keep the set very long and it developed bad sync issues and at that young age I was pretty much limited to drug store trips to test tubes. It wasn't a tube so I think I took the set apart for practice. A lot of now great sets were donated to me self educating in a doomed career path.....

[Captain Video]

I guess I was lucky, the last TV that I bought ( a 1957 8 inch metal portable ) I brought with me in an airplane. The airport people were nice enough to me to recognize that it was safer, for the TV, to be transported with me in the passenger area than in the cargo compartment.