Fire sets?
 

Let's do a I shouldn't be alive for antique TV's
Has anyone on here ever has a set that was in a fire, flood, demolition of a building that shouldn't have survived?

I got a 13" Magnavox BP portable that went through a fire in 1992. The CRT was melted down onto the chassis, and there was an inch of burned debris allover it. The owner brought it to me, just to see what it might do.

Hooked up power, and using a remote, turned it on. It actually played, and had a good picture! We cleaned the chassis the best we could for the owner, and he took it back home. Later, he told me that it ran for the better part of 5 years. He still has it.

That sounds like the "Christine" of TV sets. :lmao:

As the owner of a 1958 Plymouth, I can definitely say that they do NOT repair themselves. Mine just looks at me in the garage and says, "you want me to RUN again? Uhhhh....give me a couple years to think about that..."

Can't remember-Was '58 the 1st year of the fabled Slant 6 or the last year of the Flathead 6 ? Hard to believe a flathead design would last that long, but they did...

The 1958 Plymouth I had looked alot like Christine when the guy in the movie found "her."

I've owned so many examples of the Slant Six engine... Every one of them ran great with just a tad of maintenance, and a yearly valve adjustment. I think near the end, they got hydraulic lifters, and the valve adjustments were no longer needed.

The only thing I didnt like was working on the distributor on these engines... crammed under the low side of the engine. Fun replacing points in there... I'm showing my age here.

Just thought of this one: A customer had a house fire. They had cleaned up most of the fire damage, except for the living room where a BIG 25" Curtis-Mathes set was... The set had a hole burned in it, and had gotten soaked with water. The power company came and inspected the house before they turned on the power again... And found nothing abnormal. Turned on the power and left after doing a quick walk-through again.

Two or three hours later, we were working and cleaning and were not paying any attention to any odd sounds, until suddenly we heard a loud BUZZ sound from the living room. The big Curtis Mathes apparently had dried out, and turned back on. I thought it was on fire, until I realized that steam was coming out of it.

The people that owned the house gave it to me, and I salvaged the CRT for another project.

While I was away on a trip my CT100 decided to dead short one of the AC line caps effectively turning the tv on past the switch. C200 I think. It was running for a few days and did not burn down the house. I walked in and the smell of old tv hit me over the head. It stayed unplugged after that.

In the mid '90's, a lady gave me an '80's GE 25" color console that came out of her house after it burned. The cabinet received extreme water and smoke damage and the chassis had smoke damage. I powered it up just to see what would happen and it came on with a good picture. The cabinet was so bad that there was no fixing it and it would have been hard to sell a TV with a cabinet in that bad of condition; so, I used the chassis out of it in a similar TV that lightning had blown up.

Out of the same house came an early '80's RCA 12" B&W. I cleaned it up as best I could and sold it for $10. I never could get the fire smell out of that TV.

Tom McCahill, in his column in Mechanix Illustrated, evaluated the new fangled quad headlights, saying "two good headlights are better than four lousy ones."
:yuck::)

I used to read those Tom McCahill articles in every issue. I had a subscription for years to Mechanix Illustrated, and Electronics Illustrated. I sometimes wish I had kept them.

If I remember correctly there was a fire in a R&M fan manufacturer and just for fun one of the fire cleanup crews plugged in a fan after replaceing the wireing and it ran absolutly perfect allong with several others mind you this was in the mid 30's I love my R&M fans that I have from 1918 and onward.

I did as well and also loved the Tom McCahill articles too.

Not a TV but a Citation II amplifier from a demolished studio. A friend of mine pulled it out and dared me to try and get it playing again.
I still have it and it still plays great after cleaning and resistor(s), at least one on every output tube.
The worst TV I ever saw was a Zenith System 3 that a recluse smoker owned. The 9-160 was so covered in nicotine it looked spray painted. We covered it with 409 cleaner, let it sit overnight and hosed it off. After that we saw poor solder connections on the horizontal driver transformer. It fired right up after repairing them.
The house was another "trip"!!!!
Come to think about it, I did repair an Electrovoice FM tuner years ago from a fire. The customer cleaned it with "Easy Off" oven cleaner before he brought it to me.....

i have a halolight that caught on fire.
one of the few combos too with the tv radio and record player

The first year for the slant six was 1960.
It was designed for the Valiant, but they used it in the larger Plymouths and Dodges as well.
They still made the flatheads until the later 60's.
They used them in lift trucks and other off-road applications. They were sold as Chrysler Industrial engines. :thmbsp:

I think the best one I know of, is a 1972 Zenith with the 25DC56 chassis... I had a customer with this set, and I had done some minor work on it, and about 2 years later I got a service call from the lady; from a new address. Sadly, her apartment had burned down due to rainwater getting into the electrical panel of the building, and it started inside the wall of her apartment. She said she had been watching TV on the Zenith when she noticed the fire, and she grabbed her purse and dogs, and got out (didn't turn the TV off). After the fire was out, the fire dept rushed back into her unit because they saw flickering where they thought the fire was out, and indeed the fire WAS out. The flickering was the Zenith 25DC56 proudly displaying the evening news! The cabinet was shot; knobs gone, but the chassis and CRT survived unharmed... It seemed that the outlet into which the TV was connected, was miswired to the the panel of a different unit.

And of course I have several of my vintage TVs which I rescued after my house burned down in 1988. One of them is still-to-be cleaned up; a 1951 Kaye-Halbert Normandy. It's in a hardrock maple cabinet, and is blackened, but not too deep to refinish it "when I get 'round to it" (LOL 25 years and counting)...

Charles

Believe it or not, the 58 Plymouth, especially something like a Fury, had a 350 cu.in. engine if it was an 8 cylinder. I have argued this point to many a Mopar fan and they think I don't know what I am talking about. All I can say is look it up. I think the engine was only used a few years though. As far as the old Flathead engines go, I am not surprised that they kept them for industrial or heavy duty applications. They were fairly bullet proof and reliable. Of course the real reason for their continued use was probably more of a surplus thing than anything.

Got my owner's manual right here :)

The 350 was an available option. Standard in the Fury was a 318 with dual 4 barrels, 9.25:1 compression, and a performance cam.

Standard equipment in the '58 Plymouth was the 318 Polysphere V8 with a 2 bbl carb, not to be confused with the later 318. That's what my Savoy has.

The "Powerflow" flat head six was a 230, and it was optional....

Slant six came out in 1960 primarilly for the Valiant but was used in all models and replaced the flatty.

Hemis (until they stopped building them for a while) and Wedges had a bunch of different displacements in the late 50's. All Chrysler brands had their own displacements for a while. The wedge engines finally settled into the 318, 361, 383, and 413, for a little while from around 1959 on. Then the small block 273 came out and they all changed again. This is why there are "wide" 318's and "regular" 318's depending on the year.

Uncle Tom McCahill ! Boy, I miss him.. He oughta be required reading in EVERY journalism school, or anywhere else they teach you how to write for a living.

I owned Plymouths almost exclusively from '35 thru '55 (plus a '47 Dodge), all flathead 6's. Serviced them religiously, but never could keeps rods in 'em beyond about 50K miles. The big end of the rod (around the crank journal), would 'stretch' over time, increasing the clearance. All the rods would rattle like heck when you let off the gas going over the crest of a hill at 50 mph. It wasn't a knock either, just that signature "rattle" of every Chrysler product 6 i ever owned.

Shouldn't this thread be divided into two different ones? There are two completely different topics being discussed here.

His writing style was like he was talking directly to the reader. His off the cuff remarks were great, too.

EDIT: I'm sitting here trying to think of a couple of other fire/water damaged sets that I remember. This engine talk is helping unlock my brain.

If you can figger out how, let me know :yes:

Even with the thread drift, it's still a fun thread :music:

Exactly ! Talkin' Old Cars 'n' TVs-WHAT could be more fun ?!?

Regarding tv fires the 1948 Temple TV drove the Templeton radio company which had been in business since the 1920s into bankruptsy due to their underated transformers burning up. I think of the about 14 surviving sets half have a new transformer. It would be interesting to know the complete story of their demise.

That is absolutely amazing !A true testament to zeniths quality! I wonder what the firefighters said? I don't think any set made after the mid 70s would survive. Too juch plastic!

Couldn't agree with Steve K. more. Sandy, if you want to talk old cars then go to a vintage car site and quit hi-jacking people's threads. This is the 2nd time you've done this in a couple of weeks. Last time was in the roundie color forum. And Kamakiri, if you want to change this forum to "Auto-VideoKarma" that's your privledge.

-Steve D.

Rather than take this thread in now a third direction (since it seems to be back on track with the first direction), here's my take on it, real quick...

Don't blame Sandy for this thread drift, blame me. Regardless of who picked up the ball, I'm not going to yell at anyone for taking any thread in another direction. And so what? Besides which, that would be over-moderation, and I don't police discussions to keep them topical. The best way to steer a thread to a topic is to create topic-related posts within the thread.

Back to the thread topic....

The very first TV that I ever had in my bedroom was back around 1978 or so. One of my friends down the street was playing with matches in his bedroom (we had to be about 7 or 8 at the time), and set the whole place on fire. Luckily, most of the damage was contained to his bedroom, in which he had a brand new Panasonic 12" black and white TV, with a warped and melted case, that was put out to trash the next garbage night. Of course, seeing a TV like that in the garbage was too much for me to resist, so I brought it home.

I've never seen a set like that before or since....rather than having an on/off switch, it had a silver touch pad on the upper right of the set, that was an instant on. Very cool. Replaced the melted line cord, and a burned wire going to that pad, and the set worked fine for a REALLY long time. My parents used the set for quite a long time at their cabin after it got replaced in my room by another trash find....a GE 14" metal portable from the mid 50s. Still have the metal portable, but can't remember what happened to the Panasonic.

Well, excuse the Hell outta me....Guess I'll just take my ball & bat & slink off to home...And, actually, you're WRONG...This is at least the 3rd or 4th time I've wandered "Off Message" lately. So there.

About 25 years ago I found a little 12" B&W portable, can't even remember the brand, that had sat out in the rain somewhere for who knows long. I brought it home and let it dry out. It worked right away. I never opened it up. It had an intermittent that would cut it off every now and then (probably a tube heater) but if you waited a minute it would come back on for a long time.

I have repaired several flat screen TVs that have caught themselves on fire. I know that's not terribly interesting. There is one model of Philips LCD that I have seen fire damaged several times (I actually witnessed one catch fire on my bench too). A cold solder joint on the inverter transformer arcs and lights the board on fire. It just burns up the top of the board and surrounding components and the fire goes out. It is a plastic-backed TV, so it could catch the back on fire and be disastrous, but I have never seen that happen yet.

Not fire, but water...As a Kid, I had a 5-303W Sony. There was this girl I was friends with, we practically "Lived" at each others' houses. Her older sisters kinda "Babysat" us. Anyhow, there was a bathroom right by my room, & for some unfathomable reason, we thought it would be Big Fun to have the TV in the Can. Well, guess you can figger out where this is leading-The l'il Sony weny Kersplash ! into the Loo, fortunately, said Loo was flushed, & the TV was unplugged... Fished it out, dried it off & didn't plug it in/turn it on for a day or 2...Worked like a trooper. The luck of a 5 yr old...Amazingly, I DIDN'T some how manage to kill myself-Or anyone else...