Vintage Zenith TV (60's) in Service Saver Chassis

[bgadow]

The old TV hobby isn't that well established yet; a big part of it is that collectors are few and far between, and sets are tough to ship. So...prices are all over the place. So, on one day there might be somebody on here posting about that '61 Zenith bw console they "stole" for only $200...and the next day, somebody can't give one away!

I'm glad you saved this. These really are great sets. At the time it was bought this was probably the most reliable TV that money could buy.

[Reece]

Set was taken care of. Beautiful cabinet. Worth saving.

[tvcollector]

Maybe you could sell it to someone who would be willing to spend $200 or more having it shipped by someone on Uship...

[julianburke]

You very rarely ever see a B&W Zenith in a fancy Early American like that because of the cost. Most of these chassis' were sold in a metal cabinet.

[wkand]

That set is gorgeous! Because it's a Zenith, I and the rest of this forum knows is it pretty on the inside too, and very restorable. If this was on the NW corner of the left coast, I'd be "in" at $40-50.

Everything old is new again. I notice the cabinet stain color is like what's going in new homes these days for kitchen cabinets.

[NewVista]

I just trashed a mid 50s Sears Silvertone harvested transformer, tubes, 'lytics.

Had put it on CL for $30, no one wanted it.

[Robert Grant]

Originally Posted by dieseljeep

That's a B&W set from around 1961 or 62.

Is it really that old? The front panel looks very much like my 1966 Zenith 24MC32 color (albeit without the red, blue and green on the volume knob, of course).

As a child, we had a 22" B/W Zenith that must have been a 1962 (my mom always said it was a gift from grandmother so the family could watch John Glenn go into orbit), and the front panel looked older than this.

[Tom S]

I had the same set from my Aunt years ago when I was a kid. It was a table model with the matching stand too. Sold it when I got my first color set. A 23" Magnavox That was a mess and I had to do a full alignment on it. Someone thought they could just adjust every coil. NOT!!! but it was a learning experiance

[Reece]

Just another observation about subject Zenith: look at the grille cloth: no shadow of the speaker in it. It was operated in a clean environment: speakers pump air in and out of the grille cloth which acts like a filter and picks up dirt.

[Phil Nelson]

That's a beautiful set, but sadly worth very little in the collector market. Serious TV folk are much more interested in early B/W TVs from the 1940s, or early color sets from the mid- to late 1950s.

Demand for B/W TVs drops off sharply around the mid-1950s. Although TVs of that time (and newer) often perform better and have bigger screens than the 1940s sets, the electronic design had become more standardized by then, so they're uninteresting from a historical standpoint. The size and weight limit you to local buyers, which further limits the price.

The notable exceptions are TVs with an unusual design, such as the Philco Predicta.

Last year, we sold my mother in law's estate in MN, which included a very nice 1950s Sparton console TV. This was my wife's childhood TV, fondly remembered by her and her siblings, but nobody wanted it. Our house is already crammed with old TVs and radios and I couldn't justify the cost of shipping it halfway across the USA, especially since we had no place to put it. It was sold to a couple for a few bucks; they wanted it as a decoration and promised not to make it into a fishtank.

If you want to restore this TV and use it, it will probably perform very well for a long time. But perhaps you're in the same boat as most other people, wondering where in the heck you would put such a thing. And the cost of hiring someone to make it reliable & safe for everyday use would exceed the resale value.

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html