Hoffman CT-800, from CL

[Eric H]

I'm home with the set, 230 miles round trip but it was easy all the way, I actually got there a half hour early but he was home and I got the set with no problems, nice guy actually. He had a small mid 50's 21" Philco that he offered me for $50 but I declined due to space limitations.

Anyhow, here's what I got.
The cabinet is decent, it has a couple gouges on the sides and a dent in the top front that's seen in the pictures, nothing major the finish is worn in spots, typical of a blond set.

It's a 12" set, it seems to have always been a 12" set, it has a flocked paper mask that fits the outline on the reverse painted glass though the cutout on the cabinet is much larger and probably could accommodate a 16" tube for a different model. there are a couple brackets above the CRT that I have no idea what they are for, if I flipped them around they would just about touch the top of the 12" CRT, I thought maybe they were for a 16" tube but the screws holding them on would be in the screen area on that tube.

The seller said the set worked so I figured I'd just plug it in and see what happened, it came right on with a vertically compressed raster, it has snow and looked like it would show an image if it had a signal.

The CRT is not original or correct, it's a Dumont 12JP4 that will crawl into the good range after a bit, it would be usable except for the massive (and expected) Ion burn on the screen, it's probably the worst one I've seen.

There's no tube chart, it must have been on the back which is missing, I do know that it isn't supposed to have the 12JP4 though because the HV connector on the chassis is a conventional spring type for the standard tube, the 12JP4 has the Dumont button type connector and the anode was just stretched out and stuffed in the socket.

The chassis is very clean and it is obviously a 630 RCA or a clone thereof, the Hoffman brochure for the 16" model said it had 23 tubes but that is a different model than this, depite looking similar.

The RCA 630 is a 30 tube set, I can count about 24 tubes in this set without pulling the chassis, one difference is the tuner has two tubes where the RCA 630 has three, I'd have to get the schematic and compare to find out if there are any other differences.

Here are some pictures in no particular order, the quality control tag is there, it was built on Jan 12 1949, the chassis looks like it's stamped Jan 6 1949.
It was "Styled in California", by whom it doesn't say.

[Eric H]

Under close examination of the quality control tag, where it say model number it appears to say CT-800 with a small 12" penned in just after.

I asked the seller if he had any history on the set, he bought it at a yard sale in Santee CA, a suburb of San Diego.
the people he got it from said it had been in the family since they were kids, possibly the original owners or at least early owners.

The seller had it for about seven years.

Radiomuseum has this set listed, it looks the same, says 30 tubes with a Tarzian tuner, and chassis# 135, maybe different chassis runs used a different tuner with one less tube? http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/hoffman...ian_tuner.html

[dieseljeep]

I see the power rating is for 50 and 60 cycles, as California had some areas that were 50 cycles.