DuMont Clifton Unveiled

[Ampico-kid]

It's been quite a long battle with this one. I've never tackled a television quite this old, but with the trusty help and the wealth of knowledge of a very good Internet friend, I think I've come to the end of the restoration road on this one. I've included a number of pictures of it's progress along the way.


This is the DuMont Clifton, manufactured in 1947, which uses an RA-102 chassis, pictured here as it arrives at it's new home in Jamesburg, NJ about 18 months ago.








Aside from a thick layer of dust, the chassis were both in remarkably good original condition.




The dial on the left is the AM radio tuning dial, and at the top also contains the center tuning meter for the FM and TV functions. The dial on the right is for tuning the FM radio and the TV. The Inductuner was an interesting experience. A bit scary at first, but I took my time and carefully and thoroughly cleaned it. It seems to work quite well. Along the bottom of the chassis you can see the controls usually relegated to the back of the set. It makes more sense to have them accessible from the front so you can watch the screen as you adjust it.




The underside of the main chasis showed very little evidence of previous repair work, but the paper/wax caps were decomposing.









The safety glass gave a clear indication that this TV set lived in a household inhabited by smokers.



There were so many different issues that cropped up during this restoration, I could spend an entire "Thread" talking about all of them, but here are a few of the highlights. I found that about half of the carbon controls were bad. The carbon was lifting right off of the track and causing total control failure. Lucky for me I have a good supply of replacements on hand. The video detector diode was bad, as was one of the video peaking coils (thanks Tim!). There were many many out of tolerance resistors all throughout the set, and several wire wound resistors were open. The rest of the "issues" were mainly cap replacements and audio alignment. The crt which appears to be a factory original tests quite strong and looks quite good for it's age.

Lucky for me, the cabinet was in very good condition and only needed some minor work on the base and a general clean up to bring it back to like new appearance.

Here are the finished main chassis and power supply chassis:












And finally after more than 6 months of intense work, frustration, and persistance, here's the final product.









It's been a very interesting and sometimes frustrating experience, but never a dull one. I've learned a lot and enjoyed myself in the process and I guess that's what it's all about.

Bob