Show us your vintage B&W sets!

[bgadow]

Slowly I'll get some pictures up of some of my sets; many are crowded together too much right now. This one is a Philco console from 1954 that I rescued from an estate a few years ago. I wish I could have saved all the sets they had but it was hard to justify storing all the late 50s/early 60s bw consoles. This one was too good to let die, I felt. My first test gave me a quick burst of light on the screen & then nothing. After a few years I dug into it, recapped it & swapped the seleniums for new diodes. This brought the set to life but with no vertical deflection. This was traced to a bad transformer. I tried a NOS one from my pile but it wasn't close enough-I couldn't get full height without srewing up the vert lin. Finally broke down & ordered the correct part from Moyer & this corrected the problems. The set was asleep for a long, long time (I estimate 30+ years). I'm not totally happy with the level of contrast in the picture but it is much better than at first. Swapping some tubes and just running it some have made a difference. Note that this is a split chassis set, I have the model number written down somewhere. It took some searching as the guy I bought it from threw away the back cover! (a story for another day) I also have an RCA which looks very similiar to this that I plan on displaying next to it.