Rca new vista color tv

However, I was able to use the purity rings to get a nice round red shape in the center, rather than a misshapen blob stretching out in one direction or another. As I slowly pushed the yoke forward, the image expanded and also re-centered until red filled the screen. Looking closely, I thought I could see a very slight crescent of magenta discoloration in the extreme upper right, and an odd, faint wrinkle in the left margin.

Other than that, the screen looked great. Before setting purity, the manual had told me to set the controls on the dynamic convergence board to the middles of their ranges, which I did. Here's the infamous board with a diagram identifying its controls. We'll return to this beast later, but notice that it has twelve controls: nine potentiometers and three coils. Near the upper right is a component that puzzled me at first.

It's the gray item with a brown cylindrical core and four gray stacked plates, much like a little selenium rectifier. I learned that this is indeed a rectifier, with three diodes in one package. The topmost plate was very loose—not a good sign. We'll return to that guy, too. Back to convergence. The instructions say to begin by adjusting the three sticks with magnets until the three central color dots become a single white dot.

This was impossible, no matter how I slid the magnets in and out. Here's the best that I could do at this stage. Look at how the blue lines droop in the middle. Red and green wouldn't converge to pure white, even in the very center.

This was worse than the "bad convergence" photo I had taken before changing anything at all! I decided to cheat and try adjusting controls on the dynamic convergence board. This improved things somewhat, but the convergence was still very poor. I noted two things while adjusting controls.

One of the pots was almost impossible to turn. Worse, if I pushed a fingertip on the loose plate of the little selenium rectifier, the blue lines jiggled all over the screen. Time to power down and replace some parts. At the very least, I needed to replace the vertical centering pot and that rectifier.

It might be worth checking all of the pots on that board, too. Before replacing the vertical centering potentiometer, I took it apart and attempted a cleaning.

After cleaning and reassembly, the pot showed the same symptoms. Meanwhile, a newsgroup member offered to mail me a replacement for free, so I said, why not? The replacement looked good on the outside, but completely failed to register on my ohmmeter when tested. Here's why. The innards were burned and melted—not salvageable. I went online and ordered a new part. With the fresh pot in place, I was able to center the screen and get acceptable vertical linearity.

With improved linearity, I ran through convergence again and realized just how dodgy some of the potentiometers were.

One was almost completely stuck, and two others were very stiff. This prevented me from obtaining good horizontal convergence of red and green vertical lines near the screen edges.

New replacement potentiometers are not available nowadays, so once again I put out a call to the faithful, and a fellow TV nut found something in a parts stash that would fit.

Meanwhile, I replaced the board's selenium rectifier with three fast-response diodes. Again, here is the old rectifier still on the board. When I unsoldered the legs of the rectifier, the whole thing just fell into pieces!

The following photos show the new diodes next to the old parts, and the new parts installed on the board. But first, I reread the manual's setup instructions and noted the section about adjusting high voltage output.

I had avoided this earlier because the high voltage adjuster is under the chassis and I had no extension cables to power up the TV outside its cabinet. Another collector pointed out that, with care, I could set the chassis sideways behind the cabinet and power up with the existing cables. Slapping a hand to my forehead, I found an old ice chest the right size, and did just that. Testing high voltage involves disconnecting the HV lead from the picture tube and connecting it to your HV probe, which in turn is grounded to the chassis.

For this I used my trusty Sencore probe, seen on the bottom of this photo. If you haven't messed with high voltage before, I advise caution. The black and white TVs that I had previously worked on could generate a few thousand volts, but a color television runs much higher—in this case, over twenty thousand volts.

After insulating and taping the connections from the picture tube cable to my probe, I measured exactly 20 KV, which is high enough to run the set, but the schematic specified Actually, I had played with convergence more than three times by now, but let's call this number three. I did the full-dress procedure, starting with the twiddle sticks on the convergence assembly and very carefully following the instructions. One thing I had earlier skipped was the instruction to redo the static convergence as needed during dynamic convergence.

I didn't skip it this time, and eventually the three little colored dots in the center formed a pure white dot—something I hadn't seen since I originally disturbed things.

Red and green vertical lines near the edges still wouldn't converge, however. I took a couple of screen shots using a rabbit ear antenna and digital converter, with a modern solid-state TV on top of the RCA for comparison. Let's look. The world of the M. Meanwhile, I had gotten a couple of new potentiometers in the mail. Here's a view of these cheap little critters. I replaced the worst potentiometer on the board, but still gained no improvement after yet another full adjustment.

Notice how red and green lines are bowed out at the top and bottom of the screen. All of the capacitors on the convergence board were original, and although "orange drop" dipped mylar caps tend to be reliable, these were over forty years old.

I replaced those caps and, while I was at it, the four ohm resistors as well. The new pot is the white one at the upper left in this view. The new caps are mostly little yellow guys. Three of the capacitors had oddball values, such as. While working on the board, I had noticed a couple of components not shown on the schematic. At far upper left in the previous photo, you can see the top of a cylindrical metal can rectifier, next to a ohm resistor.

In short, my convergence board and assembly belong to a different, later model. This does not sound good. The two additional components lead to one of the board's R-G controls, so it's not inconceivable that they might affect R-G convergence. Comparing the CTC and CTC schematics, it appeared that these were the only differences, apart from a different value in one of the pots.

Crossing my fingers, I temporarily disconnected the CTCspecific components and installed a jumper. When I mentioned the mismatched board and assembly in another forum, one of the members half-jokingly suggested reversing connections to the Red and Green coils on the assembly, to see what happened. I wasn't desperate enough to start rewiring coils, but I did stick my head into the cabinet to see how tricky that might be.

Answer: pretty tricky. Looking closely at the Green coil, I spied something new. A wire had broken off its terminal. Since the wire end was hanging very close to the terminal, this wasn't obvious to the casual eye. After I repaired that wire it's the white-green lead , it was not hard to get improved convergence.

Yes, convergence really does work better when all the wires between the board and the coils are connected! Television oldtimers have told me that convergence in these sets always involved compromise. The controls are interactive, so a tiny change for the better in one area may nudge things slightly off in another. At some point you need to quit monkeying around and pick the picture you like best, understanding that it'll never be perfect.

I did four more go-rounds at convergence and finally declared victory. Now this a TV that I can enjoy watching. The first of these images is a still photo. The second is a link to a brief video clip. Please excuse the tinny audio; the microphone in my digital camera is the size of a pinhead. As found, this television had an incorrect channel selector knob.

It also was missing the fine tuning knob. I got replacements from a fellow collector. The tuning knob looks close, but I'm not sure it's an exact match for this cabinet.

The fine tuning knob isn't quite correct, either; it's a hair too thick for the opening, and tends to bind. I have the right number of small knobs, but two of them are too dark for the cabinet, more black than medium brown.

Drop me a line if you happen to have any of these items in your junkbox. The cabinet needed more than light touchups. The finish was badly faded from exposure to sunlight.

The original color is a medium dark brown, but the side panels have faded to a sickly greenish yellow in some areas. The top also had deep gouges from dragging heavy equipment across it. I avoid sanding when possible, but the gouges left no choice.

Here is the top after I sanded it and wetted it with mineral spirits to get an idea what the grain would look like. I used a rubber sanding block to make sure the old finish was removed evenly, starting with grade and going to and grade paper. This cabinet should be attractive when I'm done. The rest of the cabinet required no sanding, but the discolored finish needed stripping.

There also was a dent in the metal speaker grille, so I decided to remove everything from the cabinet, rather than try to work around the CRT, control panel and speaker grille. The first step is to remove the picture tube. Be careful—it's heavy! This is best done with a helper. I left the convergence board, yoke, blue lateral magnet, and purity rings attached to the picture tube. Removing these would force me to readjust the purity and convergence from scratch after reinstallation. This way, perhaps I can get by with a minor tweak to the convergence.

The convergence board must be unscrewed from the cabinet, of course. I temporarily taped it to the convergence yoke and CRT neck. Moving a big picture tube involves a risk of implosion. I wore safety goggles, gloves, a thick jacket, and a scarf around my neck.

Catching a shard of flying glass in your eye or jugular vein can really spoil your day! The CRT is held in place by four metal straps fastened with sheet metal screws. Loosen the bottom ones first. Be ready to catch the tube after loosening the second screw on top. Grasp the freed-up tube by the bell, avoiding stress on the fragile neck.

Laying a towel or piece of cardboard inside the cabinet, will give the tube something to slide on as you carefully bring it out. The control panel is removed by loosening eight sheet metal fasteners on the inside.

The fasteners will slip off after turning them partway; you don't need to completely unscrew them. Be careful not to break the panel's plastic mounting posts. You also need to remove a horizontal strip of wood from the upper inside of the cabinet. The bezel around the picture tube comes off after you remove several screws from the inside. The speaker board detaches complete with speakers and grille cloth.

After removing the bezel and panel, I put the mounting screws back in their original holes so they wouldn't get lost or mixed up. I stashed the CTC parts in a spare room while waiting for the cabinet to be finished.

Looks like a pile of junk, but I really will make it back into a television some day, I promise! After the stripper did its work, I removed it by scraping with an old putty knife and mopping with wet paper towels.

When the cabinet was dry, I went back over that side with paper towels and lacquer thinner. Finally, I gave it a very light sanding to match its color and smoothness to the top. Rinse, repeat. You get the idea. Detrola » Apr Fri 10, pm RCA model numbers of that era can be decoded to determine several things. Dennis Experience is what you gain when the results aren't what you were expecting.

The K at the end indicates a "Custom Collection" model that was only sold by certain dealers they usually have that odd star shaped channel knob.

I've never seen any RCA sales brochures for their custom sets, but there were the dealer price books and occasionally someone will post an old newspaper or magazine ad that features them. You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.

The tuner mechanism was not the best design, quite a few pot metal gears were used to make it one knob tuning. They published these indexes with the names in case that's all the customer remembered about their set when asked. Editorial Images. Creative video. Editorial video.

Contact your company to license this image. All Royalty-Free licenses include global use rights, comprehensive protection, simple pricing with volume discounts available. Newspapers and magazines except for covers , editorial broadcasts, documentaries, non-commercial websites, blogs and social media posts illustrating matters of public interest.

Book or magazine covers, commercial, promotional, advertorial, endorsement, advertising, or merchandising purposes in any media e. Anyone in your organization can use it an unlimited number of times for up to 15 years, worldwide, with uncapped indemnification.

Protect your creative work - we'll remove this image from our site for as long as you need it. Approvals and clearances are based on the intended use. Please contact us to tell us about your project or request a preview. Easy-access agreement.

Images marked as Easy-access downloads are not included in your Premium Access or subscription package with Getty Images, and you will be billed for any images that you use. Easy-access downloads let you quickly download hi-res, non-watermarked images.