1960 Zenith TV/Stereo Combo-WOW!

[1960Zenith]

Thanks guys! It is a hand-wired chassis & tube set, and I've removed the cabinet back a couple of times to replace tubes and look around. The selector switch is in a metal box which also has radio tuner & components attached which is why I was afraid to take it apart...so many connections etc.

I'll take another look and see if it's simpler than I thought. If so maybe I can get inside the metal chassis and take some pictures tho I don't have close up lens. With the radio & TV working having the phono work would be terrific!

@Indianajo, I know the car you're talking about! My folks had a '57 Fairlane when I was very little and I loved it. Years ago I had a '59 Mercury with tons of rust which ran real nice. Love those big, heavy cars!

[Pano]

Me and my '63 Buick on the way to Hawaii. The Buick is still there, in Honolulu.
It had a rather bad AM transistor radio that I replaced with a rather bad transistor AM/FM cassette.

The Plymouth is way cooler, tho.

[indianajo]

Thanks. If I don't drive a 4000 lb Ford, I ride the city bus. Only modern vehicle worth fooling with, in my opinion. 63 Buicks ride well, too. I suppose the military moved your Buick to Hawaii? I didn't see any old iron in Maui in 1991.
1960Z, if you do decide to replace your electrolytic caps, buy them all at once to save freight costs, but replace one at a time and test in between. One makes a lot of bad solder joints. If you just did one thing, you know where to focus your eyes for the thing that made the sound worse. Twisting the leads to make a mechanical connection before soldering helps. I use a Weller WP25 iron with a 7/32" screwdriver tip installing, but removing can tabs you'll need a 130W iron or a small butane torch iron. I break a lot of old can tabs twisting them out. You can leave the can if you wish, but the wires have to be disconnected, they short out eventually dry. Removing caps, soak up old solder with scrap stripped wire, dipped in Oatey #5 solder paste. Wipe up with a wet paper towel, Oatey makes an acid. Use tin-lead rosin core solder going back in. Read the safety rules, old electrolytic caps store energy even if the power plug is out. They must be measured as below 25 VDC before touching, or discharged with a resistor and insulated leads. Oh, and at our age, I use reading glasses to inspect my joints, and the resistor codes, about 4" from my nose. A trouble light right beside your head helps, too. I lay mine on the chassis as I work. My trouble light is flourescent, but they make nice LED lights too now, too.

[1960Zenith]

@Pano: I know that car! A black convertible version was used in the terrific 1965 JD flick, "Teenage Strangler" as a getaway car. Nice! Looks like you had a really neat cross-country adventure with that scenery!

@Indianajo: Whew! When I was a kid, I wanted to own one of those neighborhood TV repair shops that used to be everywhere. We took ours to one or two near us and the work seemed so interesting. Then solid state took over, everything is imported from China and is disposable. But I wish now that I had apprenticed one of those guys when I had the chance so that today I'd know what the heck I was doing and could restore this stuff. Sigh...

[indianajo]

I just jumped in. Nobody told me how to rebuild an engine, I read the Ford manual.I started testing the TV tubes in 1958 and stayed away from the "high voltage" box until 1965. I fixed my own car radio & TV's till I got stuck, carried the schematic 4 miles on a bicycle to my chemistry teacher's house and got a private lesson on vibrator AC power supplies and what happens when the vibrator sticks (nothing). The internet is so much cooler than learning by bicycle. Nobody told me now to rebuild automatic transmissions or differentials, I just read the manual & took off. The hardest stuff is the stuff that isn't in the manual- took me 5 installs on a transmission one summer to get it right. Case piston hole was worn egg shaped by water in it - not a check they have in the book. But I just keep going, I don't give up.
I've got a 1961 dynakit stereo working great, a 1970 dynakit transistor amp working pretty well (1 cold solder joint I havent found yet, only fails below 60 deg f) a 1968 Hammond organ working very well after 70 caps were installed, a 197? reader's digest FM radio recapped and sounding great. I quit working on TV's when the electrolytic capacitor count went over 100, it just doesn't seem worth tearing into them anymore. Beside HDTV stuff is all new, just invented, and so worth it. The one ch***** thing I forced myself to buy. And the computer disk drives, of course, I can't fix those yet.

[Davejs]

I did see a consol TV/Stereo in a pawn shop that had been tricked out by for the owner. The tube was pulled out and replaced with a LCD flat screen and tuner section was repaired along with the turn table. The coolest little item was the jack to plug the iPod in and thats what was playing and sounding great. But I still thought the $800 price tag was high on it.

[jackinnj]

Zenith: "Quality goes in, before the name goes on..."

[indianajo]

The difference between the top line producers like RCA & Zenith and the Western Autos and other store brands was phenominal. The capacitors in the cheapy jobs were just aluminum foil and paper twisted up in celophane. Not even wax dipped. And the horrible wiring & solder joints!. A top line TV was an assembly work of art it is hard to duplicate as an amateur. Same with my 1968 Hammond organ. The 193x models were a bit funnier, though. My parents bought a store brand 9" TV about 1966 from M Wards. It never would stay in sync, the horizontal decoder had an unstable oscillator due to shoddy design. I learned a few things not to do off that thing.

[jackinnj]

We had a Zenith in the den/library -- you could get it to pull in the "Browns" when they were playing at home from some station in Erie, PA about 90 miles away. (NFL Broadcast rules being what they were in that era.)

[1960Zenith]

Yeah, Zenith was the brand to have for many years...the fact that radio, turntable & TV are all still working on this unit after 51 years speaks for itself. If I could get the sound on the turntable fixed it would really be something...the radio sound on this set is amazing—floor-shaking bass and crystal clear definition on the mid-range & treble.

We had a B&W Zenith portable, probably from about 1962, when I was growing up. A fix-it man sold us a beautiful color console he had refurbished; RCA body with Zenith chassis & tube, our first color set. We loved it. About one week after we got it, the world TV premiere of "Carrie" was on and we watched it. At the height of the picture, a freak windstorm blew open the front door, which knocked the bunny ears, which tipped over a vase of flowers, which instantly shorted out and destroyed the set. It was back to B&W until Grandma heard about it, took pity and bought us a brand new Zenith color portable, which lasted 21 years.

Never stopped wanting the big console in all those years...but I got one now! :-)