Taking out the chassis is not so easy especially since the large 19-inch CRT was mounted on the chassis. I learned the flyback transformer's HV connector broke off. I spent a hour or so looking for the thread-like wire, but that was unsuccessful. I was lucky to find a flyback that was new in box, made by Admiral, and was a perfect match. When the new flyback came in the mail, I replaced the broken one with the new one, noting the wire connections on paper. I decided to turn on the TV and see what happened. Unfortunately, nothing appeared on the CRT. I put this project aside for almost a year for other reasons.
After several months of sitting around, the TV was taken out of the cabinet to be examined again. I ran a test to check if there was high voltage coming off the flyback transformer, and there indeed was. The test was performed by putting a small neon bulb on the HV terminal. It should light 10 to 20 seconds after the TV warms up. Another way to perform this test is by drawing an arc with a well-insulated screwdriver. Anyway, I connected the 1B3 HV rectifier tube. Unfortunately the tube was not glowing when the room was dark. I looked around and at an angle, immediately noticed corona coming off the edges of the flyback to the wires. Turning the TV off, I moved the wires in a better position away from the flyback. There was now no corona when I turned the TV back on, but still nothing appeared on the screen. I heard something arcing, and noticed the plate of the 1B3 was arcing to the nearest tube! It turns out I forgot to put the insulator around the plate cap, which solved the problem. Nothing appeared on the screen.
Took me a while to think about this, then I decided to play with the ion trap. I noticed something white on the very top corner of the CRT. Moving the ion trap around, a screen finally popped in and very bright.
Unlike most tube TVs I've seen, this TV had quite a few paper capacitors. About 20 to 25 capacitors (including electroylics) were replaced. Most tube TVs would have over 50 paper capacitors. However, I did not replace all the capacitors because some were in the audio stages, which I paid attention to later. Some other capacitors managed to hide from me. After the capacitors in the power supply, horzional and vertical circuits were replaced, the TV showed very little difference in performance. I asked a friend about this problem. He said to try adjusting the deflection yoke and other things, which I call "stuff-behind-the-CRT." Adjusting the yoke did not help get the picture centered. I've done pretty much everything with the yoke such as moving it forward, back, right, left, rotate, etc. Despite being shocked twice from adjusting the yoke, I decided it was not the reason for the centering problem.
I tried adjusting the controls on the back of the chassis, which barely helped. Finally, I found a lever behind the yoke, which I adjusted and that magically got the screen moving around. After a while adjusting the lever, the screen filled the whole face of the CRT. Unfortunately it seems to aim for the left, resulting in a cropped screen, which will be explained later.
No stations came in at all, so I pulled out a modern signal booster and hooked it up to the antenna terminals of the TV. Some snow appeared differently on different channels, indicating the circuits were sort of working. A picture of this is shown below.
There was a small .01 MFD 400V capacitor hiding behind all the resistors, wires, and mica capacitors. It was hooked to the grid of the sync separator tube. I replaced that capacitor and the flipping problem was solved! Adjusting the horzional and vertical hold, I was able to get several stations to come in without flipping. However, the picture quality was not so good. It'd seem mosiac. A picture of a commercial is shown below.
With the picture quality not being good and the audio being weak, all the tubes were pulled out and checked on a tube tester. I learned that several tubes such as those in the video and audio circuits, were very weak or bad. I replaced them with tubes I had that tested OK. Finally the picture seemed smoother and sharper and the audio was loud and clear. Below is a picture of a show on the TV. You can notice the T-Storm warning on the top left corner (there was a thunderstorm in my area when I took the picture), which is cropped off. For your information, this is a low compressed picture, so the TV looks blurrier than it really is.
Reading restoration stories on TVs by other restorers, I learned that some experienced their TV "crashing down" after use. I decided to run my TV for a hour as the final test, which was successful.
