24 inch Muntz restoration has begun

[ohohyodafarted]

Hi Gang,

Last Saturday I was able to pick the 24 in Muntz. I started tinkering with it on Monday. First order of business was to test the crt. The 24ap4 was still under vacuum. The crt is a rebuilt replacement. I put my B&K crt tester on it and all I could get was a crummy reading of 250 on a scale of 1000, where 200 is the cutoff between good and bad. After about an hour of warmup with no improvement I started to gently restore it. After working carefully I have achieved a solid 420 which I think will yield a watchable picture in a subdued lighting environment. With a brightener attached I get a solid 800. So if need be I can always go that route.

Next order of business was to fire up the chassis. I got sound but no picture and no high voltage either. So I shut it down and proceeded to carefully remove the chassis which has the 24 inch crt mounted on it. WHAT A MONSTER CRT. If you look at the rear view of the set with the chassis inside you can see that the crt occupys most of the cabinet interior. The crt is huge.

After I got the chassis out I carefully removed the crt from the chassis and put it aside.

Here is a tip I got from John Marinello on removing the crt. I have always had a bit of trouble with the crt socket hanging up on the focus or deflection yoke when sliding out the crt out. John said to tightly wrap a piece of paper around the end of the neck, covering the socket and the glass and tape it in place. That way when you slide the crt out, the lip of the socket can't get hung up on the inside of the focus and deflection yoke. thanks for the tip John, it works great.

So now I turned over the chassis. I was just appaled at the crapy repair work that had been performed on this chassis. All sorts of jury riged repairs including resistors that were just wraped around wires without even soldering. Several caps were completly drained of wax and you could see the foil bundle inside the cardboard tube. At some point the verticle output transformer and the deflection yoke had been replaced.

So Tuesday night I started recaping the old beast. I finished tonight. Then I installed my 5 inch test crt for the big test. The big question....will it work?...will there be high voltage?....will there be a raster?.....will there be video and audio?.....

YES!!!!!!! TO ALL OF THE ABOVE.

After a few adjustments and replacing a few weak tubes, I got a half way decent picture. I will leave further tweeking until after I have the 24 incrt installed and the chassis is put back into the cabinet.

A couple of oddities about this set....there is no HV cage, what you see in the photo below is what you get. You can't operate the chassis without the speaker because they have a power supply choke mounted on the speaker, and the audio output transformer is mounted on the chassis. Very wierd. In the photo of the set with the doors open, you will see what looks like a pencile box door that you would expect to find operator controls behind. But the door is not hinged, it clips on with some clips and comes completely off to access the controls. And the controls behind that panel dont have any knobs, just bare control shafts. Muntz was truely the king of cheap. The tuner dosent even have any fine tuning control. Talk about no frills, this set never heard of frills. The only controls on the front are on/off/volume, and contrarast, on the left, and the chanel selector on the right. No agc adjustment on the chassis either. I does however have horizontal linearity, (which some of my Zenith portholes do not have)

I will post additional pictures of this monster after it is completed. Until then these photos below will have to serve to wet your appetite.

Enjoy!