Foundie a roundie!

[RetroHacker]

Well, I finally scored a standalone roundie, 'in the wild'. It was a random stroke of luck. I had picked up a friend and we were going to go hang out and watch a movie with some other guys and I rounded the corner near his house, and there it was - it had been tossed into a construction dumpster - one of those long, low ones, and was sitting, back to me, on the debris in the dumpster. I immediately recognised the picture tube as being a roundie. I stopped the car and looked - it was sitting on a bunch of broken boards, next to a dented filing cabinet with no drawers. So I sped home (it wasn't going to fit in my Camry nearly as well as the van.) and got my dad's minivan. I got back as quick as I could and we climbed into the dumpster, and lifted it out of the debris, and balanced it on the edge, and lifted it out and into the van. I was worried that the people (or worse, the police) might complain, but nobody did. While we were up in the dumpster, a police car passed without even slowing down, and as we were carting it over to the van, two different people mentioned something, one said "Wow, they don't make 'em like that anymore", and the other one wanted to know why I wanted it - he was suprised to know that I actually fixed old TV's.

So. That was last night - I had to wait until today after work to take pictures and post here. It's a General Electric roundie with VHF and UHF tuners. The picture tube looks like the vacuum might have been let out of it, the keyway on the connector is broken off, and you can see the bare glass, and the pins are badly mangled. The most unusual thing about this set is the knobs. The VHF knob and the volume knob are sticking out about an inch and a half, and it's been extended like this purposely. The tuner shaft is connected with a little aluminum coupler to a bit of metal that the knob is on. Same thing with the volume. And only those two knobs. It also appears that someone added trim around the whole tuner section, as you can see in the picture, there is a section of it missing. The bottom section pulls out too, and I think the left and right bits are held in with sunken in finishing nails. The wood has been stained to match the television, almost. Any idea what someone was up to here? A built-in set? A cover to keep people away from UHF and tint?

Other than that, and some overall cabinet damage, it's mostly intact. The flyback looks OK, but there is no horizonal output tube, no back/power cord, and a good chance of a dud picture tube. But, it _is_ a roundie.

-Ian