General Electric roundie - fixed itself?

[DavGoodlin]

One thing I will say for GE, the solder joints and PC boards are a bit better than RCA. even the parts seem to be better grade. I guess that's not an issue when so many fewer are used than other makes.

I did re-flow solder and clean all tube sockets with contact cleaner and moved tubes in an out a few times. Between the extensive cleaning and the re-cap, I did not want any distractions from what is really wrong. Anymore, I don't even power up an unrestored set unless I suspect a bad flyback or some other issue that makes a recapping a poor investment of time.

But I should poke prod rap and tap to see if something is loose. The picture is from the previous owner on Long Island and its obvious why it was moved to the garage.GE as found.jpg

[bgk283]

Dave, the only reason it was moved to the garage is because I had so many other projects going on, it had nothing to do with not wanting to work on it. GEs aren't sets I have a lot of experience with so when you mentioned having interest in it I figured you should be the one it went to.

[DavGoodlin]

Originally Posted by bgk283

Dave, the only reason it was moved to the garage is because I had so many other projects going on, it had nothing to do with not wanting to work on it. GEs aren't sets I have a lot of experience with so when you mentioned having interest in it I figured you should be the one it went to.

It has given me much to learn (again) as GE is a different animal. The focus, color and now convrgence problems were probably mounting and the original owner just decided to replace it when it was near impossible to watch anything like that. There was little evidence it was serviced except for some tubes and the tuner cover having the usual fingerprints on it

Your RCA CTC16s are quite impressive in comparison. I don't blame you for setting a limit to working on just them. I just bought a flyback for my CTC12 after looking for a long time.

One good thing about GE, fewer parts means fewer symptoms More pronounced failure symptoms help also.

The same cannot be said of Zenith sets from this era, which can really fool you with a very unusual symptom, not even a hard fail. I am sure many were trashed due to a bad part that no technician, used to RCA and thier clones, could find.

[DavGoodlin]

The fleshtones can be found near the center of the tint range now. Earlier versions of this chassis used a variable capacitor for tint. Id like to post a picture but one single issue remains.

After getting focus back and a very interesting color stage alignment using a VTVM per the TAB manual written by Robert Goodman, it seemed like the convergence pots did not straighten out the red green vertical bars.

They are only in at the center but diverge greatly at the top and bottom.

After checking the VOT and convergence yoke and finding continuity, I suspected a control that had no effect and it too was OK.

I then unsoldered the multisection selenium rectifier and found one section shorted. A separate top-hat style rectifier was also shorted.

Question: can the selenium block be subbed with 3 standard rectifiers?