Show us your vintage B&W sets!

[miniman82]

Originally Posted by grimer

Hi.The porthole tv is a Raytheon

Cool, she's a looker!

Originally Posted by grimer

I just checked out the 3 clocks I have,they all glow in the dark.

You should take great care, then: http://reviews.ebay.com/Radium-Hazar...00000002575427

[bgadow]

I would have figured that by that time they would have used a non-toxic floursecent material, like what is used nowadays.

[old_tv_nut]

put them in a dark room - if they are dark in the morning (before sunup), it's not radium

[jr_tech]

Well, I coaxed a bit of glow out of mine by taking it into a dark room and charging it with a very bright Fenix LED flashlight. I also measured it with a Lionel* geiger counter and could not measure anything. To check the counter, I measured one of the meters on a R-390a Radio and got about 1 to 2 Mr/hr, so I think my clock is safe... but it is possible that radium paint could have been used on earlier builds of the clock.

jr

*yes, that Lionel... It appears that they made radiation counter sets for CD in the 60s.

[bandersen]

I finally scored one of those plastic "Emerson" banks. Unfortunately, the clown picture is in poor condition, but I'm sure I can print out a new one.

Yes, that is a real Emerson 648 in the background

[bandersen]

Here are a few more of my recent acquisitions.

Admiral 30A12 Admirals first set I've been searching for one of these for a long time. I found it it a barn in Wisconsin in pieces. It's been refinished horribly with polyurethane - wrong color scheme and all the decals are gone That aside, it's in good condition. The chassis are all original.


Predicta Siesta + stand


GE 800 (plus a GE 806 I picked up a while ago)


GE 802 It need a lot of work, but I like a challenge


Stromberg Carlson TC 10-H "Manhattan"

[jshorva65]

Well, I've just scored my first 621TS, but in a kind of "accidental" way. This one started out as a client's set, but arrived for its Evaluation in pretty rough shape including such a bad case of "Brown Rot" (including a "necked" 7DP4, and just look at what happened to the guts of the Tuner) that it literally took over two years to get replacements for all of the damaged parts. Actually, it was White Rot, not Brown Rot. At least Brown Rot can be treated by jumping through some hoops and collecting on Insurance to cover the cost of repairing the damage. With "White Rot", it's "Vintage" = "Used" = Insurance-Exempt and a "so, sue us, and you can lose and pay our legal fees, too" attitude. I wrote the Estimate on it and the client approved it, but I found A LOT more than I had bargained for once I started the Recapping. Since I had already written an Estimate before I discovered the most-hidden of the issues, it made good Customer Service sense for me to cap the total for the Invoice at no more than the standard maximum of 10%-over the Estimate.

Almost finished, I sent the latest Progress Report on Sunday, and the client replied that he had "lost interest" in having the set Restored, said he was "not a true TV Collector per se", said that the set seemed to mean a lot more to me than it did to him, and invited me to make an offer to Purchase it. Well, I made the offer and offered to "split the difference" for the reduction in value caused by the "ineligible for Insurance coverage" damage. Offer accepted, PayPal payment sent, and a 621 in Mahogany finish joins my Collection and list of In-Progress personal Restoration work. At the moment, I could've used the revenue more than the addition to my Collection, but the low APR on my credit card screamed "Score that 621 while you can!" at me. Since 2010 was my best year ever in terms of business and 2011 is starting with four items on the schedule from just one of the Regulars on my client list and some first-time Requests on the way, too, I opted to Buy rather than offer to sell it on Consignment for him.

The bad aspects first. Its 7DP4 necked in transit (despite being shipped separately). Refinishing needed and a weak spot in the veneer adhesive has caused a "bulging" spot in the veneer on one side. Power transformer replaced long ago with splices covered in MASKING tape. Tuner Detent trashed. All six Tuner switch wafers cracked. Cracked Sound IF tube socket. Missing Channel knob. Escutcheon lettering badly worn. HV cage cover missing.

Now for the good aspects. It's a 621TS! The price matched its "kit form" condition. I've already bought and paid for all the parts to Restore it, including a lucky score of an intact replacement 7DP4 with the kind of tester readings normally observed only on a NOS tube at a much lower price than expected. The 7DP4 might very well be a "NOS without Box" tube. By the time the Client backed out of the deal, the Restoration was already 90%+ complete. The HV cage was easy enough for my metalwork vendor to replicate by providing a 721 cage and showing them a photo of a 621cage (identical to the 721 cage except that two corner fillets are omitted from the metalwork of the 621 cage). We have an excellent Cabinetry Specialist. The Machinist who Jamie and I met at a car show (demonstrating 1/4-scale working engines including a replica 5.0L Ford V8 scaled down to 50cc that he built from scratch) had that RCA #71463 Shaft/Detent rebuilt like new in under a week. A complete switch wafer assembly was harvested from the Tuner on a cabinetless early-production 630TS chassis already "stripped" beyond Restoration when we scored it, and was a perfect match.

Other notes include. The screenshot shown is from earlier in the process, when we first tested the Recapped chassis with its replacement 7DP4 instead of a 5AXP4. Since then, picture quality has been improved dramatically. High-frequency response above 2.5 MHz is still substandard, and I'm investigating to find the trouble and get the "spokes" of the vertical wedges sharply defined instead of blurring into a solid wedge of gray beyond the 2.5 MHz / 180 Lines. It seems to be an IF issue, since getting a 22.17 MHz marker anywhere near the same 60% position on the Response curve as 25.75 MHz (corresponding to 3.58 MHz IF bandwidth) is outside available range of the Alignment controls. I've checked essentially everything I can think of, and had BigDave re-check my work.

[John Folsom]

It has been my experience that the 630/621 chassis do not have very good high frequency response. I was unable to get 3.58 mhz through my 630. Anyone else have similar results?

[jshorva65]

Originally Posted by John Folsom

It has been my experience that the 630/621 chassis do not have very good high frequency response. I was unable to get 3.58 mhz through my 630. Anyone else have similar results?

Since the 630TS that I scored on eBay years ago is still in the process of undergoing Restoration as a series of successive stages of work (another case of an eBay seller's failure to follow very specific instructions and total disregard for Insurance TOS specifications having resulted in severe "Brown Rot" and no Insurance coverage for the cost of replacing the damaged parts), the many "630-type" I've restored on which I have obtained textbook-optimal response curves and test-pattern displays have all been "630 Clone" models and some 8TS30's built after implementation of at least some of the subtle Production Changes which weren't included in the original RCA production models of the 630TS. I've found that the clone sets as far back as the Fada 799 have all produced textbook curves and only slight loss of sharpness above 3.58 MHz on display of the test pattern. When using the B/W output of one DVD player having both Composite and Component video outputs, there is considerably less degradation in Resolution and Response than expected near the 325-Lines / 4.0 MHz extreme. The 8TS30's I've serviced have produced test pattern displays very near the Ideal display parameters, showing very little difference when the onscreen image is compared side-by-side to a high-quality printed Test Card (master image from PC printed on matte Photo paper using a $300-List-Price printer with one of the best Photo print capability specifications of any "Home Office" type printer). The 721's IF response isn't easy to get "just right" on versions not equipped with a 27.25 MHz trap, but it can be done. My first time aligning a 721TS took several hours to complete, although much of that was because I was still using a very "Rube Goldberg" arrangement of test gear (Precision E-400, Precision E-200C, Heathkit IM-4110, and Tektronix 547 'scope), injecting Sweep and Markers separately, and setting Marker points with the E-200C dial while watching the IM-4110 readout for each step of alignment. Here is a screenshot of "Law & Order" showing over-the-air reception on that first 721TS that I aligned, taken in 2002.

[cchaven]

Here are my two sets...a 1948 Admiral 30A14-N, which I just picked up locally from craigslist yesterday, and a 1959 Philco Seventeener III. Both are complete and unmolested and I hope that the Admiral will be up and running relatively soon. Due to the compactness and layout of the Philco, I'm not sure what I'll do regarding trying to rebuild it.

Jeff

[peverett]

I have re-built a couple of the Philco Seventeeners. They are not too difficult, there is room behind the TV chassis for new filter caps. The two main difficulties are 1(removing the PC boards from the chassis as they are soldiered down(with no access to the back of the board), and 2(replacing the multi-cap/multi-resistor modules that were in use at that time.

[johannkinard]

can anyone tell me anything about a 1946 hotpoint tv

[Adam]

That set's from the late 1950s, not '46.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by peverett

The two main difficulties are 1(removing the PC boards from the chassis as they are soldiered down(with no access to the back of the board)

I just wimp out on a situation like that and connect to the old cap's leads with J hook style. Maybe use a mandrill, using a small nail just slightly wider than the old cap lead, wrap the new cap's lead around it in a spiral pattern and then bend the lead 90 degrees to make it a straight butt connection with the old lead on the circuit board. This avoids having to attempt to remove the circuit board, and damage or mistakes with associated wires with the board. Do it neatly and it won't be that ugly.

and 2(replacing the multi-cap/multi-resistor modules that were in use at that time.

Above j hook method isn't usable for that, unfortunately. As you'd probably have less than 2 mm of lead to work with, trying to solder to that without unsoldering the lead from the board backside would be dicey...

[Eric H]

Originally Posted by johannkinard

can anyone tell me anything about a 1946 hotpoint tv

That's probably a 1958-59 model, 21" screen, slimline chassis.
It was made by General Electric who owned Hotpoint.

Very good set to restore and watch old movies on! I have a tabletop GE that probably has the same chassis.