This weekends estate sale finds........

[Tony V]

Doug i hate you! Seriously though..great finds bud! I might as well face it..i'm going to have to move up north to get some of those goodies you guy's have been stumbling across. I havent been able to find any tubed tv sets around here at all...no less a tubed color tv. The ones that i do have i had to drive at least two hundred miles to get. I've done the paper and bullitin board thing and as of yet no replies. I have my RCA roundie color tv stereo combo but want another roundie to put in my den/office. You know how it is, once you have one roundie you got to have at least another...lol!
I had a Sylvania almost like yours but it must have been an older model because it wasnt a hybrid. The front and cabinet and knob arrangement was identical to yours though. I got rid of it when i was still a kid when a friend of the family needed a set. Its long gone now but remember it played great for years.
Tony

[Carmine]

Doug, you really hit the jackpot on those estate sales. I heard some rumors that you might be headed up Detroit way??? Get in touch with me via e-mail, fifth89#yahoo.com, and maybe we could do some tradin'???

[Jeffhs]

I like Doug's Zenith roundie. It brought back memories as we had one like that in our electronics lab in high school in the '70s, although ours was in a woodgrain metal table model cabinet. However, we never got our set to work (at least I never saw it operating). I'd hang on that set, Doug; they don't make them like that anymore.

[Jeffhs]

I don't know if anyone here can call what I have a collection, but I have two Zenith tube radios, K731 (AM/FM, 1959-60) and H511 (AM BC only, 1951). No room anymore for televisions (except my 1999 RCA XL-100, my main set, and a 1995 Zenith Sentry 2 in my bedroom) since I moved to a very small apartment nearly four years ago, but, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I used to collect old TVs like crazy back in the late '60s until 1972. I had to give that hobby up in mid-1972 when we moved (years before I moved to where I live now), however. The story on all that is in one of my previous posts, so will not be repeated here.

I enjoy looking at the pictures of the old sets you guys have, though, especially the Zeniths (I've had a passion for anything made by Zenith Radio Corporation for many years). Doug's 25MC32 looks like a set we used to have in the electronics lab at the high school I attended (must have been a very, very popular model in the early '60s; seems like they pop up everywhere in this forum).

I am amazed that the only problem with that Zenith of Doug's was a disconnected focus lead on the CRT socket. That's great when one can get a set working with little or no fiddling, or just minor repairs. Many, many perfectly good TVs, radios, stereos, etc. wind up on treelawns every week just because of small, easily repaired problems such as disconnected wires, bad tubes or, believe it or not, just because the set's cabinet doesn't match the decor of the owner's living room (the last often happens immediately after a remodeling job). Many of the sets I had back at my former home fell into the "only thing wrong with it was/is a bad tube" category; one or two new tubes and I had a working set (I had a white Admiral 21-inch table model like that, only I didn't have to do a thing to it; I just brought it home, lugged it down to the basement, hooked it up to the attic antenna, plugged it in--and two minutes later I was watching a crystal-clear picture from one of the Cleveland stations).

Of course, there were the sets that had major problems; these I used as parts sets. I had a Philco Microgrid 390 21-inch console that worked (again, right off the bat, as soon as it was powered up) for quite a while, until the CRT base came off in my hand one day as I was working on the set. I managed to get it going again by soldering (carefully, so as not to crack the glass) the CRT socket leads from the chassis to the wires extending from the now bare neck of the tube. This got the set working for a short while, but one of the leads eventually broke off, ruining the tube (but not before falling across one of the other connections and making a small spark; to this day I don't know why that didn't blow the set's own line fuse, or the house fuse on the line to which the set was connected).

I cannot begin to imagine how some of you manage to have so many TVs in your basements, garages, etc. My collection was small enough to fit in one half of my basement, but the lists of sets some of you have (I've seen most of them) look as if, as at least one person has said here, you could open an antique television museum.

I hate to think, however, of the job most of you are almost certain to have if or when you sell your homes. I have read of cases in which the former homeowner has left old TVs in the basement, etc. after he/she leaves, but, IMO, such a course of action would likely be impractical for most of you, given the size of your collections. I had to give up all but three of my sets (a 1964 RCA-built Silvertone color roundie and a 1961 Philco 19-inch B&W portable which eventually became my main set, not to mention a late-1960s Sharp 12-inch monochrome portable) when I moved the first time, over thirty years ago.

[Rob]

Jeff,

I hate to read a sad story. You know that fellow that invented the phrase, "You can't take it with you"? You should go punch him out!

Yes you have a collection.

[bgadow]

Jeff, I know where you are coming from. In 1990-92 I amassed close to 20 tv sets, maybe more? Over half were tube color sets (mostly rectangular) at the time these were showing up all over the place at the dump & all the used furniture stores. I remember the Sylvania with a bad cabinet but great picture-when it lost vertical deflection I thought the crt went bad so I scrapped it! There was the Zenith that sat outside a local store for a month in the winter before I hauled it home. Finally got it going, a great set. Eventually swapped the chassis into another Zenith I brought home with a better cabinet. That one had different yoke connectors. I must have spliced it halfway right because I got a raster! There was the Philco-Ford, one of the best tube color pictures I've seen. I traded it for a Truetone multiband radio! I remember a GE & a Bradford made by GE; several Admirals-they got worse as they got newer.

All that stuff was in a collection of buildings behind my mother's house (and in about half the rooms inside!) A tree fell through the roof of the largest building and Mom was getting fed up-everything had to go, and it did, sadly. I really miss a lot of those sets.

[Jeffhs]

Thanks for all the comments, guys; I appreciate each and every one of them.

I have all solid-state equipment here, except for two Zenith radios I scored on ebay. I have to say, however, that my Zenith K-731 AM/FM radio (1959 model, one of my ebay scores) sounds quite a bit better than my TV's audio and, in some ways, even my Aiwa bookshelf stereo with three-way speakers and 240 watts total output. I bought that Zenith more for the looks of the cabinet (the thing matches the furniture in my apartment just about perfectly) than the sound, although I do fire up the radio every now and then just to keep the capacitors formed.

The older TVs had much better sound than today's so-called "stereo" sets with their small transistor-radio speakers. I again reference a Zenith 23-inch monochrome console I had from roughly 1969 to 1972. That set was one of the best-sounding TVs I have ever heard in my life, second only to my late grandmother's 1951 General Electric console with a 10-12-inch speaker directly below the CRT. My Zenith had a 6BN6 quad detector, 6BQ5 output stage, 6x9 oval speaker, and a wide-range tone control. It sounded so good I patched an FM tuner into the audio system, as I mentioned in an earlier post. When you have a TV with a sound system this good, it's a shame not to share it with other hi-fi gear if you have it. (My grandmother's GE console TV had also been modified so that the audio from her Silvertone radio/phono could be run through it; I remember when I was a kid listening to it when she used to have it on, and that 12-inch speaker in her TV made the RP unit sound great.)

Here's a list of my current audio-video gear. Nothing fancy, but then again I like things as simple as I can get them (and I don't have the room in my apartment for anything more).


RCA F-19261 XL-100 19-inch color TV (audio patched through to my Aiwa bookshelf stereo; I use this connection mostly when I am listening to one of the music channels on Comcast digital cable TV)

Panasonic PV-4022 VCR


Aiwa CX-NA888 AM/FM/CD stereo, 240 watts, four-channel surround sound


Zenith H-511 Consol-Tone receiver, BC only, 5 tubes

Zenith K-731 seven-tube AM/FM receiver (honestly, it sounds so good it should have been in Zenith's Consol-Tone line, with its two-way speaker system, large speaker and heavy wood cabinet; this set sounds unusually good for a table radio, especially in the bass range!)

[Jeffhs]

I just reread bgadow's response to one of my recent posts. If he had many of his old TVs in outbuildings behind his mother's home, and a tree fell through the roof of one of the buildings, I hate to think of how much broken glass, etc. there must have been in the damaged building when the CRTs of those sets almost certainly imploded. I don't know how many of his sets were without their back covers, but if I were a betting man (I'm not), I'd bet any one (or all) of those sets had the CRT necks snapped off immediately (not to mention CRTs imploding right and left) when the tree wrecked the building.

Just out of curiosity, bg, how large was the building the tree hit? You said it was the largest one behind your mother's house. She must live on a lot of land, on a farm I'd guess.

BTW, what is the size and population of Federalsburg, Maryland, again just out of my curiosity? I don't know for sure, but I'd say, just as a stab-in-the-dark guess, it is a town outside Washington, DC or Baltimore, and not very big. (I live in a small apartment in one of those out-of-the-way places myself. The village in which I live is some 30 miles east of Cleveland, and has a population just under 3,200. The TV reception here is so bad you need at least basic cable just to get the Cleveland stations.) If you don't want to answer this question here on AK (I realize it is way off-topic for this forum), you can e-mail me at [email protected].

Kind regards,

[bgadow]

Jeff, from my short time on this forum getting off topic doesn't seem to upset anybody! The building was not huge, maybe 16' by 16'? Was a screen house that had been built in. The roof and sides were covered in that translucent green stuff. Anyway, the tree really didn't tear too much up, but did enough damage to the roof that it wasn't worth fixing. I don't think any stuff inside got messed up, but really put me in a pinch. The other buildings were 8 x 10 affairs. Speaking of picture tubes breaking, I know of two that broke on me about that time. One was a JCPenney (RCA XL100) that was sitting on a stack of other tv sets in the doorway. I don't know why I had the back off of it-the door swung in the wind while I was standing there and was nothing I could do. I had a spare crt but never did swap it. I did take the busted tube and carried it up on the roof, on the end of the house there was about a 30 foot drop to a concrete pad-I had a terrible time carrying it up there, then dropped it on the pad. Why? Cause thats what guys do! Would have been lots more entertaining if the tube wasn't broke already, but then I wouldn't have had the nerve to carry it up there! The other broken tube: my best friend in school was living next to an auction barn-on their dump pile one day was this Zenith bw console from about 1960. I loaded it up in the truck, as soon as I rounded the corner it fell hard on it's side. No apparent damage and when I got it home it worked fine. Later had it sitting in this shed and after a very cold snap I walked in there and there was a big crack right across the face of the crt. I really should have tried it out to see if it still would work! I don't know if it was the fall, the cold, a combination?

As for Federalsburg, it is on Maryland's Eastern Shore-I am about 5 minutes from the Delaware line. Balt/DC are about a 90 minute drive on a good day. A good amplified rooftop antenna will bring the city stations in pretty well, though I use cable right now. The local stations on uhf come in clear with very little antenna. The town has a population of around 2500.

[Chad Hauris]

CRT's with integral implosion protection are pretty tough. I got one from the dumpster (sylvania) where the whole neck portion of the CRT was gone, there was about a 7" hole in the back of the CRT right behind the degaussing shield, but the stuff that was there was all intact. When I was a kid I hit the neck of a bad CRT with a shovel, no implosion, just a big hiss as the air rushed in.

[andy]

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