GE M112YVY B&W Portable

[Electronic M]

Last pic looks like the horiz osc is off freq.

[Zenith26kc20]

I remember those little critters. They did tend to develop vertical issues after warmup. Usually bad capacitors. And yes, they get hot! Zenith had a small 12 inch that got very hot also. If I remember, the Zenith used a silicon diode to reduce the filament voltage. The diode would short and blast out one of the tuner tube filaments.
I also admired how simple the circuit was and how complicated the chassis was physically on that GE. Does the flyback "sing" after it gets hot?

Well, the last couple of weeks I've had so much stuff going on that I haven't really had time to work on the set until this weekend. I decided to start with the can caps. There are two main PC boards that are joined together at the tops and bottoms with brackets that form a kind of A frame that fits over the neck of the CRT. Tucked in the middle underneath the neck is the can with a small PC board attached to it. The can is held in place by a metal clip (first picture). Everything comes apart pretty easy.

I wanted to try my hand at restuffing the can anyway, but with this I really had to reuse the can because the clip holds it in place and without the can the rest of it would just hang loose. I guess it's another example of engineering for economy and weight. It's an original GE four section can.

I followed bandersen's method and cut the can open at the shoulder. The foldover at the rim is very small and looks like it's recessed into a groove on the ring. I figured it would damage the ring trying to pry it up. The insides probably haven't seen the light of day since Kennedy was President. The paper was pretty dry on the outside and wasn't a lot of paste left. There wasn't much tar inside and it peeled off pretty easy too.

Mounted the new caps, shrink wrapped everything, and hot glued the can back together. Hopefully it will last a long time. There is only one other electrolytic and several paper caps to replace in the set.

[Reece]

That's pretty neat, fifty years old and fires up right away. Just noticed, that's a lot of speaker for such a little set.

Well, I had a setback. I accidentally bumped the horizontal osc coil and it broke off and rolled on the floor and unspooled a bunch of wire. The plastic tube is pretty brittle and crumbling, but obviously I should have taken it off to work on the board. I looked for a replacement and no luck yet. Somebody on ARF was working on a similar set back in Feb. and had to replace the coil too and found one, so I'll just have to wait until another turns up. The GE part number is ET36X664, Merit TV-250, or Miller 6352, unless somebody knows of another suitable replacement.