I wouldn't worry too much about 3DG4 availability. ESRC 1 has them for $4.00 each so so they can't be that rare. I would buy four of them because you don't know about the future.

[QUOTE=old_tv_nut;2987257]"was?" :D
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Uhh, yeah, uhh, well, uhh, (Cough, cough, hack, hack..Clears throat...)...OK, still AM....(grin) But seriously, my grandad had a '65 Zenith roundie in his office that we'd watch the New Years' Day parades & games on, & it had convergence issues a bit...Or it coulda been that I was just sittin' 2" away from it, mesmerised by a "Color" TV... Its sittin' about 4' away from me, one day it'll get to go see Terry & hopefully get brought back to life...

Back in the day, there was an aftermarket item specifically for that purpose. It amounted to a bungee sized to go around the outer perimeter of the convergence yoke, thereby holding the whole thing firmly together. Dunno where such could be found today, but it shouldn't be too hard to make one.

Great find, BTW!
Bill(oc)

JC, I have some 3DG4s on the shelf; I have a ton of tubes to sort through and will set aside the next few I find for you (but it will be awhile.)

That's a beautiful set! I wish Steve at the ETF would find one of these for the museum. I think that Zenith's first mass produced color set would be a great addition to the collection there. These sets rarely pop up, I'd love to have one too.

I started working for a Zenith dealer in 1963 and those sets were built like a tank. I talked a neighbor into buying one and it ran well 15 years before its first service call,

I must have gotten lucky on at least one thing with my Zenith. It has the 25LC30 chassis and uses .5A solid state diodes instead of a tube for rectification. It's good to see an extended ZENITH thread! I wish I had time to get somewhere with my Zenith! I want to find out what is making the horizontal output plate glow red and smoke from underneath. I'm sure that its a capacitor or THREE, as my set was dormant for at least 10 years. I took off the nice access cover on the bottom and at a glance could see two large (probably 1 watt) resistors sitting side by side that have heat bumps all over them where they have been cooking. I didn't see anything charred as I would expect after seeing smoke more than once.

Well, the silicon diodes may give the 25LC30 chassis and those like it a bit more reliablilty--but there is just SOMETHING SPECIAL about watching those two big 3dg4 rectifier tubes come on line---and power the chassis. BTW__ONE of them will actually be enough to power the set---but it will overheat, as I had that happen on my 29JC20, when one 3DG4 was not making proper contact and not working,. the picture did NOT shrink or bloom--but the plates did glow a bit on the one working tube.

As for your overheating HOT, probably a 6HF5, as I have the same set with remote (25LC20Q) across from the 29JC20 (and mine DOES work, at least the last time a had it on, but has a VERY bad cataract on a GOOD tube--) I would make sure my 6U10 H osc tube and caps and such around it was ok, as it sounds like you are losing drive. Be sure you osc coil is good too.

Thank you for the tips. I agree with and undrstand about that "SOMETHING SPECIAL" feeling that you often get from a tube doing its job. I have sat and watched a chassis work with the lights out for quite a while many times. Seems like the HO causes a lot of issues in these color sets, more so than I can say that I hear about in the black and white world, which is where I have spent most of my time. I owned several "roundie" color sets back in the 80s because in the early 80's I was a kid that would wander into the local TV shops and be fascinated by the older stuff often buried underneath newer finished repairs or other sets that the owner never came back and retrieved. I think that it sort of impressed the old TV repairmen. Several times they gave me the old color sets that I mentioned. I remember one was a remote set which I thought was a big deal being my family had just progressed to our first remote controlled color console for the living room. I was toying around with old TVs even then, but my abilities were VERY limited. I was lucky that those old color sets would play all night long, and for years with little or no repair. When something went too wrong back then I would just part a set out and find another. I could even swap color CRTs back then, but I was certainly weak on circuit repair.

This current Zenith model 5111 to me is the best thing that I could have wound up with. The metal cabinet makes it lighter and probably dissipates heat better than wood. The lines are clean and the set is about as basic as one could imagine. Mr. Muntz must have given Zenith a kudos for their simplicity!:thmbsp: As long as the Sylvania crt is up to par, I should be OK. The blue gun reads weaker than the other guns, but still within the "good" range of my tester.