In the early '70s, I had a 1964 Sears Silvertone roundie in a black table-model cabinet (got it from a man in my hometown who had had the set in his garage goodness only knows how long). The chassis bore a strong resemblance to RCA's CTC-12; in fact, the set being discussed in this thread (CTC-11) reminded me of mine. Worked after a fashion until 1972, but I had some problems with it after awhile (convergence way off, hum bars in the picture, very unstable color sync), but the final straw was when the video-output tube socket broke out of the circuit board in 1973 or so.
Oh well.
Once the knobs are replaced and the cabinet touched up on Charlie's set, I think it will be a very good one. Those RCA roundies (as well as the company's rectangular sets of the '60s through the '80s, including those fabulous 3-way color consoles like the "Brindisi" model of '64 vintage or thereabouts, not to mention the ColorTrak series through ColorTrak 2000) were built to last, and didn't have nearly the issues modern "RCA" sets have these days. However, I have an RCA 19" with a CTC185A7 chassis which has given me no trouble (except one small repair not long after I purchased it) in the almost four and a half years I've owned it. Was I just lucky to have gotten a good CTC185, considering how troublesome a lot of those sets were? The set works great, beautiful picture and all. Purchased an extended warranty on it that runs through 2006, but I don't know if I'll have to use it. I understand that once the issues with the onboard tuner in these sets are addressed and corrected, the sets will run for years, not like Gold Star-built "Zenith" televisions that seem to have one problem after another (including those junk CRTs which have a nasty habit of shorting after only about two years or so, taking much of the video circuitry with them), causing them to wind up in the trash after only a very short time (usually shortly after the warranty expires). When I had the small problem with my RCA repaired, the technician also resoldered the joints around the OB tuner. That did it. Those repairs were done over two years ago, and the set still works great today.
Never had one bit of trouble with the CRT, either. Which reminds me. I asked this question once in a previous post, but never got an answer. Are inline-gun CRTs with aperture grilles and dark-tint screens now the industry standard for CRT-based televisions, or do some very cheap Chinese/Korean-built sets, with manufacturers' names no one has ever heard of (!), still use the earlier delta-gun tubes with shadow masks? There must have been some improvements over the years, as the picture on my RCA CTC185 is absolutely beautiful, like a picture postcard.
(For example, the nature scenes on the National Geographic Channel look every bit as good on my set, IMO, as the pictures in the magazine.) Much better than the sets I grew up with in the '70s. The only thing, IMO, that could possibly beat these modern tubes as far as picture quality goes would probably be the old rare-earth-phosphor color tubes of the '60s, often found in the better makes of roundies of that era.