Philco 50-t1430 restoration, one odd issue so far

[Allison Rae]

We have been working on the restoration of a Philco 50-t1430 that we picked up last year. Strong 12LP4A and upon initial inspection the chassis was really clean. Unfortunately this was not the case under the chassis. There was several poorly done repairs and it appeared like something may of exploded in the area of the volume control that damaged the control and caused a great deal of chassis corrosion. Also there was an abundance of extremely bad bumblebee caps that the best of them had leakage at 25VDC. After taking care of the faulty components and cleaning up the mess from the previous repair we powered up using a 5AXP4 test box. This was the first time I used the Yoke in this unit and was curious to see how it would work, especially since we didn't feel like pulling the CRT. Well after a slight hiccup we powered up and only had Horizontal. Did voltage checks and nothing. I was suspecting the Vertical output circuit or Vertical output transformer. What we found was a complete surprise. The Ground on the Vertical transformer had never been soldered, it was merely wrapped around a ground terminal. After roughly 75 years and some corrosion it lost connection. A quick bit of soldering and we had a raster. This is not the first time I have seen a connection in a piece of vintage electronics that was not soldered but this was the first big issue I observed one causing. Photos to come.