Who Has a Col-R-Tel?

[Dave A]

After several years of working on this beast, it is looking good...for what it is. As my girlfriend calls it, "the twirly set".

The B&W set behind it is a Philco 50-T1402 tabletop on an original stand. All restored. I have had the wheel for about 7 years and it too is electronically restored with the help of at least 3 good friends. Recently I took the wheel apart and steel wooled the commutator and secured the brushes when the video started looking noisy. All of this in its original condition

The last piece was the rubber drive belt. After 50 years it gave out. Attempts to glue/melt/staple the belt did not work. One of those friends had found a perfect replacement and it did the trick. Along with some light machine oil on the hub. It is very quiet once it gets up to speed and locked after only a minute or so.

It is now stable and has been running during two Phillies games the last two nights. The flicker never seems to go away to my eyes. The blues are more tourquoise than blue to the eye, although the pix below show a real blue. The tint range is above average. There is enough color range for any eyes. But the detail in any video is gone...very gone. A function of the original set and whatever the Col-R-Tel does to the rest. The pix show the real image. Look close and you will see the mask is in focus and the video is what it is.

It suffers from having no delay line in the design compared to others like the Colordaptor which did. The color smear added to the luminance is offset to the right a bit. But the picture is quite viewable in 1956 terms. There is a trace of a scuff on the wheel where it rubbed on a pulley over time.

The Philco has been changed from the original 12LP4 to an aluminized 12KP4 for the added brightness. There is an aluminized version of the 12LP4 if you can find one. Dump the ion trap and all is well. The color filters drop the brightness about 60% or so, but the 12KP4 makes up for that. I can run it...in a darkened room...with no retrace lines and a very viewable picture. All fed by a VHS connected to my cable.

For a better description of how it works, I urge you to look at the website of James T. Hawes who has disscected it;

http://www.hawestv.com/mtv_color/colrtel_block.htm

The photos are from an Olympus 810 in "night scene" mode which is a very slow shutter speed and gives the full color view. There is some motion blurring to them. Someday when I have the time, I will compose photos of a test still image to show the individual color images and the resulting brightness of each filter that makes a full color image.

Dave A