I found a Sylvania round color set!

[RetroHacker]

I posted an ad on CraigsList on a whim, looking for any old tube based electronics. A guy responded and said he had some stuff to get rid of. He said on the phone that he had a "real old color set" in the basement I could have.

I went over, and lo and behold, it was a roundie! An _old_ roundie. He used to do TV repair, and this was his first color set. He had replaced the picture tube with a brand new 21FBP22 in 1970, and the set saw occasional use until ten years ago, when something went wrong with the AGC. He said that it would work and produce a raster, but when there was any kind of signal, it got overloaded and wouldn't produce a watchable picture. He never got around to fixing it.

The set has been in his basement for a long time, and the moisture hasn't done the cabinet any favors. It's in rough shape, but I'll see how it looks after I have a chance to scrub with some Murphey's oil soap. The chassis is in pretty good shape, not much rust, but the caps are in sad shape. Some even have mildew growing on them. It uses some big scary selenium rectifiers.

The cabinet is really pretty cool. The top lifts off to provide better access to service it, and it looks like it would have been a really nice looking set when it was new. The chassis mounts sideways, the tuner is part of the main chassis - a nice feature, I think.

While the cabinet says Sylvania, the chassis is really an RCA CTC-4. And the back says RCA as well. Makes sense, RCA did have the market on color TV at the time.

I can't wait to start working on this one. I can't believe I finally found a repairable round color set!

I've also never seen, in person, a round color set this old before either - I didn't even know they made a CTC-4. And now I have one!

-Ian