Found a Predicta... - Videokarma.org TV - Video

leadlike · #1 09-19-2008, 02:54 PM

Just saw the ad on Craigslist this morning-an ad for a tabletop Predicta in good cosmetic shape for fifty bucks. I just brought it home:

http://s288.photobucket.com/albums/l...t=100_1385.jpg

The lady said she and her husband were in the tv repair business (in fact, that is how they met) and this was something they picked up during that time. She said that it used to work but that her husband ultimately tired of dealing with its emotional problems. We talked for a while, and she had some interesting stories about those days. In the end, she brought up her husbands old tube caddy, still filled with compactrons and later type tubes, as well as a box of much older radio tubes.

She knew her repair lingo, and said that the crt should be okay, and that the flyback and other hv stuff was also never really an issue. I noted that the electrolytics were newer and she said that her husband had replaced those about ten years ago. So, I did a brief variac warm up test after confirming the working electrolytics. While the filament string worked fine, I did not get any sound, picture or hv. I stopped at 80 volts, so we'll see what happens when I get it open. So happy to finally get one of these!

Sandy G · #2 09-19-2008, 03:45 PM

Great story & score...Can't wait to see working pics...

Philcofan42 · #3 09-19-2008, 10:10 PM

Looks identical to mine (the one in my avatar). Sounds like you may not have too far to go to get it working again. They are a blast to watch old shows on!

Congrats!!!
Dan

*zenithfan1* · #4 09-19-2008, 10:35 PM

Congrats! That thing is really sharp, good price too. It's cool that she knew so much about the set.

leadlike · #5 09-20-2008, 04:55 AM

Yeah she was really cool. She was kind of low key until she asked what I was going to do with it and I told her I was going to try to repair it. Then she opened right up and started talking about the tv repair business 'When I started out, most of the sets we got still had 5u4s in them' was how she began her story. She said she and her husband got out of working on tvs altogether as she said you had to be crooked to make any money out of it, and her employer at the time was, in her mind, dishonest. Primarily he sold pricey service contracts at 59.95 per year, which was indeed high. She also disliked how all service techs had to say 'it looks like it will need to go in for an overhaul' which meant an 80.00 bill, even if there was really nothing wrong with the set. However, if you flipped at the 80.00 price tag 'well, we have these great service contracts that would save you from costly overhauls....' She said her employer was not the only one who did this, and it seemed to her to be more of an industry-wide type thing; and she just got sick of taking sixty bucks from naive old ladies. Wow.

On a lighter note, I have gone through all of the tubes I got from her:
the tube caddy looks like one of these:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-RCA-tube...d=p3286.c0.m14

So it is pretty typical of the era. It was packed tight with tubes, organized as high voltage and sweep tubes in one compartment, miniatures in the other, and everything else down in the middle. A wide range of tubes from the fifties to the mid sixties. The caddy itself is the first one I have ever seen that did not have a tube brand advertised across it, such as RCA on the ebay example I provided. Instead the top is covered in a generic checkerboard pattern.

The box of older tubes held a lot of big amp tubes, some 2a3s, 807s and 6l6s. I am not familiar with amp tubes but these are pretty cool. The rest are all receiving tubes and they are all pre 1935 in design ie-only a couple of metal radiotrons, etc. She said her husband fixed radios as a hobby for a while so that is where these came from.

I saw some other gear sitting around while I was there-a Heathkit VOM, a degaussing coil, several rusty rack mount tube amps, and other odd bits and pieces. I would have certainly worn out my welcome asking about that stuff. Sorry for the ramble, but I thought I would get down my thoughts about the day before I forgot all about it.

electroking · #6 09-20-2008, 08:56 PM

Great find indeed, and a memorable meeting as well from what I read.
Just as a foonote, metal tubes are not pre-1935, in fact they were introduced
in 1936.

Dan Starnes · #7 09-20-2008, 09:03 PM

Great score and I love my Predicta.
Dan

Tony V · #8 09-20-2008, 10:04 PM

I have a red and white one like this. Nice find!
-Tony

bgadow · #9 09-20-2008, 11:31 PM

I enjoy stories like that. Sounds very similiar to a mom-and-pop repair shop near here. She works the counter-and is pretty good at terminology-and he works the repair bench. He works on radios as a hobby. He even has a Predicta upstairs! I hadn't talked to them in some time, but got a call from "mom" just yesterday. I had previously helped them find a part for an '80s RCA that a customer brought in (an AK member saved the day that time!) and now they have a CTC159 in the shop that needs some parts. I hope I can help them out again-they were generous with me, letting me take a couple truck loads of TV sets and several caddies full of NOS tubes (mostly all typical TV stuff) and I would like to find ways to repay them.

When I was on the phone yesterday they joked that if I find those parts I should next look for someone who wants to buy a TV shop! They've had the place for sale for a few years but no bites.

leadlike · #10 09-22-2008, 01:50 PM

Just replaced a bad fuse (it was testing as an intermittent) and found a cold solder joint on the main pc board. I did a slow power up on the variac and got great sound and a vertically squished picture with a very strong raster! Looks like it'll be a winner after a little tlc and recap.

There has been work done on this chassis before-a number of caps were replaced with orange drops and yellow polys. These were all done without removing the pc board so the work is a little rough. The audio output transformer has also been replaced, and that is very sloppily wired in-just some twist connectors to hook it back up to the speaker. I checked the flyback for melted wax, and found this one to have a hard red candy shell around the flyback donut. No wax to be found. I'm guessing this was also a replacement as well. The band around the crt has been replated, the other brass pieces have not been and are in just okay shape. The little brass end caps on the crt stand are also missing. The antenna and back are also absent, however, she gave me the little brass cup that held the antenna as well as a piece of angle iron with an HV warning on it-although I don't know where that would go...

Since this is such a common set amongst us AK tv folks, does anyone have a SAMS that I could use? I'll donate the money I would have spent on the SAMS to AK as a fair trade.

gadget73 · #11 09-22-2008, 05:48 PM

I've actually heard that its safer to not pull the PC board on a predicta, something with the heat of a solidering iron causing the foil to lift, and the pc board being generally difficult to work with.

wa2ise · #12 09-22-2008, 07:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gadget73

I've actually heard that its safer to not pull the PC board on a predicta, something with the heat of a soldering iron causing the foil to lift, and the pc board being generally difficult to work with.

All consumer equipment circuit boards of that era are like that. Foil is easily lifted. It is possible to make reasonably neat and professional looking recaps by clipping the old wax cap leads at the old cap's body, and using that lead wire to J hook or in-line-twist a solder joint above board. RCA repair manuals often described how to do it, so it is a valid repair method.

I did this with my old RCA B&W TV set above, as it was pretty much impossible to access the back side of the boards anyway.

DaveCT · #13 09-22-2008, 08:11 PM

Great find! And Predictas are great TVs. I finished restoring mine a few months ago and, contrary to what many would say, I thought it was relatively easy to work on. Although not the same model, I followed the advice on this site (http://antiqueradio.org/philc12.htm) and removed the circuit board to replace the caps and out of tolerance resistors. If you're careful (i.e., take good notes and treat the circuit board with care), it's straightforward and fairly painless.

Oh and one other thing: don't forget that your TV was likely mothballed for a reason. For my Predicta, after I recapped it and put it back together again, I found the vertical linearity control to be open after I powered it up. A quick substitution and I was up and watching Twilight Zone episodes.

Best of luck!

Dave

peverett · #14 09-22-2008, 09:20 PM

I have re-capped a couple of the Philco Seventeeners from the same era. I did not have any trouble replacing the PC board capacitors other than de-soldiering the PC board tie downs. I was able to de-soldier the tie downs without too much effort.

I used a 25 watt soldiering iron, not a high wattage soldiering gun, when replacing the caps mounted on the PC board. I think this is why I did not have trouble with traces lifting, etc. The only place that I used the gun for was to de-soldier the PC board tie downs(connected to chassis metal) and for capacitors not mounted on the PC board.

gadget73 · #15 09-22-2008, 10:35 PM

I did the PC boards in my '57 Admiral without issues either, so its definitely possible to do it if you're careful. I was more commenting about the existing repairs being done above the board not neccesarily being a kludge. I didn't do my Admiral that way because there wasn't enough lead to do it with, and it would have been more work to try and hook the new parts in than to simply pull the half dozen old caps and replace them. I spent more time getting the circuit board in a position to work on it than I actually did working on the thing.