Show us your vintage B&W sets!

[Marlin Mackley]

There are a fair number of them around, I have two of the single chassis models. These, is the several models built, are supposed to have the largest bakelike castings ever made for anything. I don't know if that is true are not. The earliest ones have a seperate power supply chassis in the bottom, does yours?
Marlin

[msepic]

Marlin:

My Admiral is a single chassis model--# 20x122

I haven't had much time to work on it as I've got a new old house in South St. Louis that needs more immediate attention.

However I did change out a few caps in the HV section. I was able to get a brief flicker of a picture until one of the other caps started dripping wax. There is hope!

Is there any particular product you'd recommend to polish Bakelite? I have no major problems, but I'd at least like to bring the shine back to it.

Is there an antique TV/radio club in this area that you know of? I have not found any.

There are a bajillion sites for polishing Bakelite:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i...shing+bakelite

I just don't have the time to review them all, but you can start with the above link. Word of caution, some (all?) Bakelite contains asbestos so keep abrasive polishing to a minimum or at least do it outdoors. A simple dust mask will NOT protect you, only one of those Darth Vader units with charcoal filters will help.

Anthony

[Marlin Mackley]

Hey msepic, you are only 20 minutes from my place! I am in Fenton, about 2 miles from I-270. Check my web site for directions and give me a call and come by some time! 636-326-9096. http://www.studio4-17.com
Also the St. Louis radio club link is: http://blues.netscad.net/~joetausr/ARCH/
They are having there monthly meeting the second Tuesday 7 PM at the Kirkwood civic center, and the Fall swap meet and auction in October.
Marlin

I've come to the conclusion that the Admiral consolettes are fairly common out there. I've seen more of those models than anything else on the various sites that deal with vintage TV's. Mine is just now being brought back into working condition (I hope) by a local guy. It's the single chasis model also. I posted a similar question to yours about polishing up the bakelite and was advised to use Magnolia Glayzit. It's not cheap and I can only find it on line and they kill you on shipping. I won't buy any until I'm sure the set can indeed be fixed. It is NOT carried by Graybar Electric as one person advised. But hey, in the scheme of things it's not that much more money to add to the cost of getting the TV working again. I was told by a TV/Radio historian that Admiral was a pretty good brand back in those days and I think he said they were more popular than RCA's, so that's probably why there are so many of them out there still. They're supposed to deliver good picture quality when they are in optimum working condition. I'll spare everybody the redundancy of posting a picture of mine here. And I'm still looking for a way to rig a remote control for it. There are old VCR's out there that have volume controls on them, but they are pretty tough to find, and I think I'm dreaming as far as finding one with a switched outlet on the back, so I may end up improvising. Good luck with your set!

[Jeffhs]

Originally posted by rp2813
I'm still looking for a way to rig a remote control for it. There are old VCR's out there that have volume controls on them, but they are pretty tough to find, and I think I'm dreaming as far as finding one with a switched outlet on the back, so I may end up improvising.

If you can find a cable box with remote control, you can have both remote volume AND a switched AC outlet; almost all remote control cable boxes have both features, as well as remote channel selection. Of course, if you hook up your set to cable through one of these set-top boxes, you can get the same features as well. If your TV can tune to channel 3 or 4 (as yours obviously does), it will work with a cable box, the fact that the set is over 50 years old notwithstanding.

As the last poster said, good luck with your set. Those older sets are in many if not most cases built and, once in peak condition, will work much better than today's black plastic "cube" sets coming off the assembly lines in Korea and other offshore locations. They just don't make them like your Admiral anymore.

BTW, I have had good results shining Bakelite cabinets with ordinary furniture polish, such as Endust. I polished the Bakelite cabinet of my Zenith H511Y radio with this spray polish a few months ago; looks great today.

[Jeffhs]

Originally posted by heathkit tv

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i...shing+bakelite

Word of caution, some (all?) Bakelite contains asbestos so keep abrasive polishing to a minimum or at least do it outdoors. A simple dust mask will NOT protect you, only one of those Darth Vader units with charcoal filters will help.

Anthony

I'll be darned. I learned something (two things, actually) today. First, I didn't realize, myself, that Bakelite contains asbestos. As well, I was not aware that ordinary dust masks are not effective against Bakelite/asbestos dust. I have seen those huge dual-filter gas masks you mention; they look like something straight out of a science-fiction movie or TV show, as you said, but they are effective against more types of toxic dust and fumes than garden-variety dust masks (the kind you can get in most hardware stores).

Hey Jeff,
Thanks for the cable box advice. I hope you can clear something up for me. I will be hooking my Admiral up to cable since I'm in an area where rooftop antennas provide only marginal reception. I'm under the impression that analog cable boxes like the one you describe won't work if I'm not subscribing to that kind of service, and I have digital cable now with two set-top boxes. Can I really use an analog box on the Admiral in this situation, and would any box I find at a thrift store work? I've seen a lot of them out there that look like the analog boxes I had before I went to digital. That for sure would be the ideal solution for me.

[andy]

...

Thanks Andy, that makes total sense! I have two cable-ready TV's that work fine on the non-digital channels. I'll start checking for one of those old analog cable boxes and see if I can track one down that has volume control.

[ChuckA]

This thread has been quite for awhile, so here's a set I dragged home recently. It's a DuMont Manchu, and it's BIG.

I have additional pictures on my site at: http://www.myvintagetv.com/dumont_manchu.htm


Chuck

[Big Dave]

Philco swivel consolette

Originally Posted by ChuckA

.......here's a set I dragged home recently. It's a DuMont Manchu, and it's BIG.
Chuck

Foo! Man that thing is spooky lookin......I didn't know they have TV's back in the Victorian era Went to your site and saw your mention of that chassis being used in the bar sets....think about it, at the time so few people could afford TV so what better thing to draw more customers into a bar than a TV? (besides free beer and naked broads I mean). I bet for a while larger bar TV's were big business for many of the TV makers.

Anthony

[Jeffhs]

[QUOTE=heathkit tv]....think about it, at the time so few people could afford TV so what better thing to draw more customers into a bar than a TV?
Anthony [\QUOTE]

Especially a big set like that DuMont. I hate to think how much that particular set sold for when it was new--probably a grand or more (in late-1940s dollars). My aunt had a Stromberg-Carlson b&w console in the early '50s, same cabinet style as the DuMont under discussion here but white. I also hate to think how much her set cost new--again, perhaps in the $300-400 range (it was TV only, no radio or phono).

You're right; in the late '40s few people could afford TV, and from what I hear the '50s weren't much better in that regard (at least until the small portables came on the market in the latter part of the decade). When my folks were married in the mid-'50s their first TV set was a used RCA 21" console, followed, IIRC, by a used Crosley Super V 21" console (both monochrome--heaven knows they couldn't afford color in those days, but then again, neither could most folks 50 years ago). The first new TV I can ever remember us having was a Silvertone all-channel 17" portable in the mid-'60s, and even that was b&w. For some reason, my folks never had a color TV--as I mentioned, all our sets were b&w. The first color set to grace the living room of our house (aside from an old Silvertone roundie I got from a neighbor in my hometown in 1970, which remained in the basement) was my grandmother's 1971 Silvertone 25" color console; she brought it with her when she moved into the house in 1972, after my dad married his second wife and we wound up moving to another town.

[Jeffhs]

Chuck, I was browsing your site a few minutes ago and found a picture of a GE UHF translator (what was later known as a converter). Its design struck me as unique, if odd, in that the channel selector dial was not marked 14-17-25-35-46-56-72-83 (for example) as all later converters were, but this one had the channel frequencies marked on the dial (starting at 470 MHz and ending at 890--this was back in days when the UHF TV band was still 70 channels).

I ask you, who could remember (or even knew) the channel frequencies of the various UHF stations in any city (the few towns that had UHF TV in those days, such as Youngstown, Ohio, Fort Wayne and possibly Evansville, Indiana, et al.)? Continuous VHF TV tuners were difficult enough to adjust for proper pictures; at least their dials were marked 2-13 (with FM between channels 6 and 7 on most DuMont sets), so there was no guessing as to which channel your TV was tuned to. Why didn't GE mark the dial of their translator with the actual UHF channel numbers, rather than forcing people to remember channel frequencies which are generally known only to station engineers and some dyed-in-the-wool TV hobbyists? Ordinary viewers, after all, don't care about such things as the frequency range of, say, channel 14. Technically-savvy folks know that's 470-476 MHz, but those numbers mean nothing to the average viewer.

Later converters and continuous tuning dials on all-channel TVs were calibrated in channel numbers, which, IMO, made a lot more sense to the average viewer who has little or no knowledge of or interest in how a television set works. After all, most ordinary people don't know or care how radios work, let alone TV. The idea of sending sound over the airwaves is beyond the understanding of most folks outside electronics; how sending pictures (video to us AKers) over the air is possible is totally baffling to most people as well. I know people who don't care how their color TV picture looks, as long as it's there--even if there is no color at all, or if whatever color is there is totally wrong. These folks were the ones for whom today's completely automatic TVs, completely devoid of front-panel controls except for one row or column of pushbuttons and functions accessible only by means of onscreen menus, were made (I don't know that most people even realize these menus even exist). The menus are accessible via a menu button on the front panel or the remote, but I would guess most people don't fiddle with them--they just accept the default settings out of the box and say "whatever" if someone tries to explain the menus to them.

I also think it is a wonderful idea that all service controls on modern TVs, except for focus and, in some cases, the G2 level (as on my own RCA CTC185), are hidden in service menus, accessible only to service personnel who know the access codes to get to them. Many televisions were heavily damaged or even destroyed (or at least incurred damage which was expensive to repair, especially in the case of color sets) in the old days of potentiometer controls along the rear apron of the chassis when viewers would go turning them at random, often "just to see what happens." Small children are notorious for this kind of stunt, but curious adults have been known to do the same thing--as I said, often causing serious damage to the chassis or CRT, which in turn leads to costly repairs. Moving the service adjustments to hidden menus eliminates this problem; the fact that the focus and G2 controls are on the back of the set will not lead to nuisance service calls either, since these controls can be adjusted only by means of a special tool available only to service personnel.

Most televisions made in the last decade or so (even the cheap offshore brands with names no one ever heard of), and all current production sets, are about as close to tamperproof as one can get. There is almost no way an average viewer can damage a modern TV by fooling with the service controls (except in cases where a person guesses the access codes simply by the luck of the draw, but then again there's the code or button sequence required to access the menus in the first place, which is generally unknown to the average person, so even this is practically unheard of).

For most viewers, however, since the service menus are invisible and, in most ordinary cases, inaccessible to them, there is almost no chance of anyone but a qualified service person altering the settings of the service controls. This is a system which should have been in place (its analog equivalent, anyhow, later followed by digital of course) from the beginning; it would have saved TV repair personnel much time responding to nuisance service calls, necessitated by viewers having fiddled with rear-panel controls they had no business adjusting in the first place.