Sharp TS-103 14" Japanese market TV restoration
 

Hey all, been a while :smoke: but life is ever so busy and my new job (bench tech at a computer museum) has kept me occupied with plenty of restoration projects outside of the scope of this site :scratch2:

For the past year or so I've been importing a small selection of interesting TVs from Japan and slowly restoring them to working order. There is very little information online about Japanese TV history (in English, anyway) and so I'm very interested in what their sets were built like, the differences in circuit design, and in general some of the more oddball features that we never got. So I thought I'd start with something simple - a 1950s black and white set:

https://imgur.com/hz88sPz.png

From what I can gather, these 14" TVs were basically Japan's version of the ubiquitous 21" black and white sets that still litter Facebook Marketplace for pocket change here in the states. I only paid around $50 (excluding shipping, of course) and found nearly a dozen other sets from different manufacturers that were basically the same thing excluding differences in styling. I'm assuming the size discrepancy is due to how relatively small Japanese living spaces can be - space is probably a lot more sacred. It's technically a tabletop set, but actually has threaded holes in the bottom so that legs can be screwed in! I didn't get any, sadly, though I suppose they could be made fairly inexpensively... :scratch2:

Anyway, when the box first got here, I was assuming it was going to be a writeoff. It was delivered in the rain, so it was waterlogged, and had clearly been stacked under a ton of weight as the entire top and sides of the box were wrecked:

https://imgur.com/bqZrmOC.png

But yet, when unpacking, things didn't look so bad:

https://imgur.com/kH2lTSb.png

It actually survived! The only "damage" was the service cover getting slightly bashed in and warped, but that is very easily straightened out. You know, maybe buying a lottery ticket ain't such a bad idea after all...

The back is in perfect condition, and the original thumbscrews are still present, so I do not think it has been serviced much if at all. Note the little baggie with replacement fuses still tacked to the top right corner:

https://imgur.com/dPbYXPC.png

Both live and neutral are fused. I've never actually seen this in an American set, it's usually just live if even at all. The third fuse holder is a voltage tap to switch between 100V and 110V, which is another confusingly common feature considering I have found nothing showing these sets were ever sold in the US. I'm not quite sure why the extra expense was considered (perhaps they were sold in other 110 volt countries?) but it certainly makes my life better:

https://imgur.com/4ti6LFO.png

Taking off the cover reveals the point to point underside:

https://imgur.com/CQ4f2L5.png

Despite the extra fusing it is still just a plain old hot chassis set, neutral straight to chassis. For safety (relative in this instance I suppose :lmao: ) plastic insulators keep the chassis & mounting bolts from contacting the metal cabinet.

Interestingly all of the paper caps are Sharp branded, and the electrolytics are early Nippon Chemi-Cons. They're certainly the oldest I've ever seen. In the interests of keeping the set as original as possible I am going to try to keep the lytics in the set. It is certainly not going to be a daily driver for me and the less parts I need to change the better:

https://imgur.com/oINnPF1.png

The flyback has a translucent plastic (?) insulating cover, which I think is really neat:

https://imgur.com/1W2PpMA.png

But enough ogling! I'd love to see the set display a picture and so restoration begins. The seller plugged it in and only got a horizontal line on the screen, so I figured if there was any damage that would happen through a powerup, it was already done and tested it myself. Indeed there is no vertical but I DO get static through the speaker, so I think basically everything aside from the vertical circuit is working and it should come back to life with a simple recap job. I get this Friday off so I think I know what I'm doing! :D

You can get 60s style legs at Menards...A few of my TVs have them.

The insulators between the metal hot chassis and the metal cabinet is standard practice for TVs and radios and is critical, otherwise the cabinet would be always be hot. The same goes for the screws that would anchor a hot chassis in a non-metallic cabinet.

Different countries have different electrical codes that products must adhere to,
that explains the two fuses.

Some of Japan has 100V and other parts have 110V. Originally it was all 100V.
Due to all the destruction of WWII and the help re-bulding the US did afterward, the new electrical generation in some area followed the US standard of the time. Another aspect is that the 100V system runs at 50Hz and the 110V system runs at 60Hz.

FYI: Menards hasn't expanded to Virginia yet.

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IIRC, the early Shinkansen lines were 60Hz, just to save that extra few lbs in weight onboard.

Meanwhile in the US, we're still running a 25Hz system, in a country where nobody generates 25Hz power. Amtrak generates it themselves via converter stations.

I’ve known about the frequency difference for a while but never voltage. It is my understanding they were always 100 volts. Admittedly this is a difficult subject to research but from my cursory investigation I can’t find any sites claiming they ever used 110, do you have links to a place discussing that?

Anyway I’ve made lots of progress on recapping today. I got all of the paper caps on the underside of the chassis changed. I spot checked a few of the carbon film resistors and all of them are still basically dead on in value so I do not expect any problems there. I have one more paper cap hiding in the flyback cage to swap out and then I need to figure out what I want to do with the electrolytics.

The doubler cap is obviously bad, it’s leaking out the vent and will be restuffed, but I see no evidence of (physical) leakage in the other caps. And all of the critical sections are demonstrably not shorted as the set still powered up and tried to work albeit with no vertical. I will probably check at the terminals for AC ripple with the set on and figure out if they need to be changed or not from there. But I am happy with the progress so far! :D

One thing I often come across in these Japanese sets is their tendency to twist component leads together before soldering them down. It cuts down on the amount of wires wrapped around the lugs for sure but can be incredibly irritating when trying to separate a paper cap from good parts…

What a very cool set. Do you have a schematic for it? I can't wait to see the restored version working!

Thanks! Sadly I do not have any service data. Japan is a lot more stringent about "piracy" than the US. I can usually find a Sams scan for domestic equipment if I look hard enough, but for Japanese market stuff I often find myself SOL unless I get lucky and find someone selling a paper copy of the original service info. In this case I don't think it'll be too much of an annoyance because I've worked on a bunch of black and white TVs and am generally familiar with how they work, but in some other more involved projects (and things like Japanese home computers) it gets painful fast.

For example I ended up spending $60 on a rice paper schematic for a red Trinitron I imported because I needed the winding pinouts for the flyback - its part number was nonexistent online.

Did you check the tubes in the vertical stage? I would check the Vertical Output Tube, that's the first tube I would suspect if the TV doesn't have vertical (I've ran into that with 3 1950s and 1960s vintages TVs I've restored so far.)

Good Luck and and that it a pretty sweet looking TV, I've stumbled upon many old Sony B & W TVs on FB Marketplace (some of them from the 1950s or 1960s) so older Japanese Sets are still out there you just have to keep an eye out for them.

Vertical output tube is a possibility but not really something I consider worth checking as long as the set is on original parts. Much more likely the papers were leaking/shorted and causing the circuit to not oscillate.

I have a fairly sizable collection of early Japanese import electronics, but I don't think Japan was exporting to us at the time this set was made. The earliest sets I've seen made for the American market came later in the 50s and into the 60s.

Last night I restuffed the doubler electrolytic. Turned out to be a lot more labor intensive than I was expecting - it was still full of electrolyte paste. And actually it still tested "ok" on my LCR meter, but the fact it leaked through the vent means it was probably not long for this world. Ah well. An hour of digging out capacitor material later... :drool:

Hi,

Your set is from the beginning sixties!
Because of their 14" screens they look older then they are in real!:D

I have a big collection of vintage japanese TV sets.
Starting in 1953 (official start of japanese television) with roundies up to 1958 with a Sanyo.
I don`t speak now about TV sets which were sold worldwide as
export models.

History:
The price of japanese TVs was organized by the government and
the majority was the screen diameter!
That was the reason why up to about 1964 most TV sets were 14" sets!
Among the sets of my collection are three 17" sets, these were total luxury
in the 50s (2 Sharp consoles and a General table set).
I saw only one japanese 21" set in my life.

Anywhere I have a chart, but more than 90% over a time were 14" sets.

I have from most 50s/early 60s japanese TV sets schematics and often sales literature.
Maybe I can help you with a schematic......:yes:

Regards,
TV-collector :stupid:

It would have to be before 1960 since all of the parts and chassis are marked with the old rounded Sharp logo wouldn't it? I appreciate the info and would love a schematic if you could find one! If anything just to keep on hand because I enjoy studying schematics and different circuit designs.

First power test today and it was a massive success! The set works extremely well and has a superb picture. Great greyscale and contrast, fairly good linearity, and EXTREMELY sharp. The tuner is so sensitive it picks up my agile modulator transmission without an antenna connected. No hum bar so the lytics I did not change are still ok. Only issue is unstable vertical linearity which is most likely just a dirty tube socket. Very happy with the result :D

Need to finish cleaning the knobs and trim pieces and then I think this set is good to go!

So it is a Sharp Tv! ;) I’d like to see a schematic , If only to see how they designed the set.

Being sensitive isn’t a big surprise. I suspect most places, the best you could do for an antenna was rabbit ears…

No, just the design with one big channel knob at the right and 2-3 smaller knobs on the left side points me to the 60s.
The front-end with all that plastic is typical for the early 60s.
My ´58 Sanyo looks much older than 1958, that style you can see at american
1952/53 models.
The japanese companies still use the old american tubes (2 thick pins) from
the early 30s deep into the 50s!
Btw., Sony, astabl. under that name in 1958, as I remember right, never build tube TVs :thumbsdn:, so don`t
search for one.

I will search for the schematic or something equal.:scratch2:

Regards,
TV-collector :stupid:

2 Japanese TV sets can be seen in Gojira 1954 (Godzilla 1956) , anyone know who made those TV sets ?

Hi,
I remember this? 50s japanese movie.
I saw it in the 70s and it teached me to search for an old japanese TV set!:tresbon:
One set was in the laboratories of the creator of the animal.

Would you like to point me to a free site to watch it again.
I am common with vintage japanese TVs today!:yes:

Regards,
TV-collector:stupid:

When I can I will try to take pictures of the TV sets , I don't think the movie is on line for free

Finally wrapped the Sharp up for good! Work got really busy for a time and hobbyist stuff got put on the back burner for a bit, but I finally put the finishing touches on the restoration. I am glad it was relatively straightforward to get working.

Really the only complaint I have left is there being too much width, requiring the vertical being cranked to compensate. I don't believe the chassis has a width adjustment so the best course of action would probably be trying different horizontal output tubes, but considering it is entirely original with all Sharp-branded tubes, I'm inclined to leave it. Anything that isn't a test pattern specifically designed to amplify flaws looks just fine, and this set is really more of an interactive display piece rather than anything I'll ever use as a daily driver. It's firmly good enough! :D

Also, through cleaning the safety glass and CRT, I discovered it has a defect! There's a super tiny bubble in the face of the picture tube in the lower left corner. I don't think I've ever seen that before.

Hopefully more to come soon. I have a handful of interesting Japanese color sets in the restore queue and I think they will make very fun threads!

Should be able to reduce width by increasing value of resistor feeding the H.output tube's screen grid. Of course HV will be reduced commensurately, which usually is tolerable.

After a number of years, I finally tracked down the schematic for this set! I've been importing some service data compilations for Japanese-market TVs, and one of the volumes has the TS-103 in it (along with many of their other early sets, back to their first, the TV3-14T). I suppose I've got to eat three-year-old crow; TV-collector was completely right about its age and I was wrong! The release year is listed as Showa 36 (1961) :yikes:

https://i.imgur.com/zp7bcRT.png

Good to finally have some concrete data on it in case it breaks in the future. But I have to say, it has been strikingly reliable aside from some fiddly tube sockets :D

Full-res picture of the schematic here: https://imgur.com/a/xbwnyf7

.

Good Job! Nice Set! Sharp made some top notch stuff back in the day.....

.

Hi,
That is good news, some things take a while, sometimes years.....:headscrat
I know, what I am talking about.......:rant:
Time is running like sand......:thumbsdn:

It is a problem, that japanese collectors doesn't share informations with us.:tears:
I have one good friend over there, but he doesn't collect TVs or has friends in this TV busyness.

Some years ago, I made bad experiences with the boss of the japanese collectors club.
He wanted to know, how I could find him online and who is the (bad) guy, who bought me all the old radios, TVs and shipped them to Germany!

I had to search for him here for a source of vintage transistors, but the other way round he didn't answer my questions about schematics and missing knobs.:thumbsdn:

Another problem is the complicated language.:tears:

It is easy, to get in touch with collectors in Europe, north & south America. But not with japanese collectors.
If they were interested, they could show their stuff here or in an european forum.
It is maybe different to the audio-fools.:D

Happy weekend,
TV-collector:stupid:

I've had the same experience! The Japanese collectors are a more insular hobbyist community than any other group I've ever tried to contact or be a part of. I am acquaintances with one sympathetic collector who has helped me with some hard-to-find service data (mostly sending me physical copies in the mail), but the language barrier makes communication difficult, and he's pretty apprehensive about sending parts. One of my late friends was a prolific collector of vintage Japanese computer systems and had the same problems, with one Japanese collector telling him off for stealing their "cultural artifacts" :screwy:

What surprises me is that Japanese collectors aren't on this forum and other American forums using us as a resource to purchase Japanese made US market TVs... There's still a good number of surviving sets across the US, both Japan and the US use NTSC (yeah there's only workable channel overlap on the upper half of VHF and probably UHF) so compatibility with their local standards would be fairly good, and there were many cosmetically (if not also electrically) unique Japanese made US only models.

As a collector of primarily American TVs (the number of Japanese sets I have is pretty good too), part of me sees stuff like European adapted American GE portacolors, PAL Demodulator Hybrid Zeniths in the hands of foreign collectors and thinks "I'd like to import one of those to the states"..... There ought to be someone in the Japanese TV collector community who at least has had a version of that thought with regards to Japanese export models in foreign countries cross their mind.

One thing that I do somewhat understand is the service literature thing. I believe they're very serious about copyright over there. Granted, it seems a little bit odd to care about it on something as obsolete, low monitary value, and niche as much of what we're into collecting is.
Once the OEM no longer is capable of supplying the service documents necessary to maintain something it becomes an important duty of the collector community to preserve that documentation and prevent its total loss... Often the most effective way of preserving documentation is to make it findable and available. If one collector has it and dies then that literature is probably lost, but if 10 collectors have a piece of literature and one dies there's still 9 copies out there.

I've seen a handful of American sets go up for auction on the Japanese sites over the years, so I think there's at least a little bit of interest. There was recently a Predicta Debutante listed at about ~$300 starting; I wonder if, considering the rapidly inflating price point of Predictas, it will some day become cheaper to import them from Japan than to find them domestically :lmao:

WRT the service data, the unwillingness to digitize or share is definitely driven by Japan's highly strict IP laws. My aforementioned Japanese video game/computer collector friends go through hell trying to save or digitize anything. On the vintage computer side, most of the software and disk dumps available online are from American collectors spending sometimes hundreds of dollars on importing original disks to image, fighting the Japanese collectors who also want them to use, or at least "preserve." And after all that time and money, Japan's often-humid climate doesn't make magnetic media recovery very easy at all...

I think the presiding collector mindset over there is basically that if you can't get original copies of service data or (in the case of computers) software, the equipment is to be retired.

Hi to all,

in Japan, there are exceptions. i have a good friend, Noriyoshi T., retired, ex-Japanese JAXA space program (among other things), we met in Tokyo in 2013 and he was kind enough to guide me around the NHK and Sony Museums.
To stay busy, he repairs anything electronic, lots of hi-fi (Braun and B&O specialist), and several Predicta TVs. He's also made a specialty of adapting vintage car radios from the Western to the Japanese domestic FM band.
His Blog, updated weekly, via Google translate :

https://ameblo-jp.translate.goog/vrc...en&_x_tr_hl=en

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France

Jerome,

I would love to meet him! I am always happy to talk to more collectors willing to bridge the international gap :D

You took the words right out of my mouth.
That has historical reasons, Japan was a closen country for some hundred years!
They all speak english, but they are not in GB-forums busy!

I saw a TV report, that there are places, which are forbidden for non-japanese people.:uzi:
They could share with us, showing pictures and so on, but nothing.
My friend bought me everything I wanted, bit nether wanted to thank in my name to the orignal owner.
When I wanted to know something, he had only one friend, he could ask.

He doesn't want to be a "crime" to help, that rare historical stuff leaves the country.

With his help I have now a nice japanese collection, from early sets (30s), 2 hornspeakers, early post-war.
roundies with 7" & 2 sets with 10" CRTs and some 14" and the very rare 17"/70° sets from most interesting or rare companies.
One set makes me big trouble, it is a 10" Urakawa, ultra rare, destroyed by DHL (after that, we took them no more :dammit:).
We bought the set without knobs.:nono:

Because I bought the literature, radio & TV electronic magazines, I have only one advertisement without picture of that company.
My friend was not able, to find something out.
A picture should help, to build some re-productions.

My literature contains japanese pre-war television, nice pictures, the sales literature from old TVs is nice, too, I bought what I can get, if it was from the 50s.
That gave me an overview.
Today it might be possible, to scan and translate into german/english or what ever.
My 1953/7" Toshiba is missing the lid and the knobs, but I have the sales literature for it, reproduction by the picture might be possible.

My 1954/7" Toshiba is missing its knobs too, but I was able to buy the 14" version of that year with the same knobs.
Only the decals are missing, but I have only a b/w picture, now I have a problem with the reproduction. What is the color?:scratch2:

O.K., btw., since 26 years I try to get the knobs for a Westinghouse H-196, I should buy a complete set, parts set, only to get them, before I die.:rant:

Regards,
TV-collector:stupid:

Bonsoir Jerôme,
Just saw my Nippon Columbia TV-1 from 1953.
https://ameblo-jp.translate.goog/vrc...en&_x_tr_hl=en
His set has all knobs wrong!
Mine is complete.
I own the follower with the 10" CRT, too.:banana:
Japan has a terrible "missing-knob-problem" and a "mice-attack-problem"!:tresbon:

Cordialement,
TV-collector:stupid:

Don't forget the earthquakes......... and the limited space in most flats and houses....

Regards,
TV-collector:stupid:

ME TOO!:blah:
There are not so many looking over the edge of the own table....
Regards,
TV-collector:stupid:

Hi to all,
Hi TV-collector,

Glad ! you saw your Columbia TV on Mr T's Blog.

If anyone is interested, here are 121 photos of the NHK Museum i took in 2013 :

https://photobucket.com/share/5eebd2...9-b7307baacaac

At the Sony Museum, taking photos was forbidden.

As to buying collectibles from Japan, sites such as "Buyee" makes things quite easier.
here, for instance is the "collectible TV section" :

https://buyee.jp/item/search/category/20036?lang=en

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France

Thank you very much for the photos Jerome! It is a treat to see the Yaou/General Colornet set up close. What I would do for one of those...

I know Buyee and the other proxy sites well; that's where I got the subject of this thread :D I have a few more black and white sets on the way I'll probably make a separate thread on eventually.

Hi to all,
Hi again cj-reha,

NHK Museum : yes, i was thrilled to see a real Yaou/ColorNet beam-index TV, too bad there are no working demos of antique TVs.

Tokyo visit 2013, here's is a tour of Akihabara, used to be known as "Electric Town", everything electronics & specialized boutiques for parts :

https://photobucket.com/share/ea558d...b-3c4bb5f6e648

unfortunately, by 2013 there were no more of the gorgeous hi-fi items & sophisticated TVs/Video gear we used to see in the magazines of the 70s & 80s when journalists travelled to cover the yearly shows.

TV of my dreams & totally unobtainium : the Sanyo CTV-30 Watchman/Flat CRT color TV, 1986. e-type4 has one in his collection, see here (scroll down mid-page) :

https://visions4netjournal.com/sony-indextron/

One of our French forum members has scanned many Japanese European TV & hi-fi catalogues of the 70s & 80s
all as downloadable pdf's :

https://windows7passion.fr/soleil.levant.html

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France