Blonde Predicta Tandem

[bandersen]

Here's my most recent Philco TV acquisition. It's a nice blonde Predicta Tandem set. It actually sold on ebay for nearly a grand, but the CRT and enclosure were destroyed by UPS when the seller tried to ship it. He filed a claim, which of course UPS declined, so he listed just the console base back on ebay. Luckily, I have a spare head unit so bid on it and got it for a fraction of the earlier selling price. It's the one we were discussing in this thread.


I flipped out a bit when I opened the box because there was sticky clear packing tape stuck all over the original finish


Slowly, over the course of an hour, I carefully peeled it off. Success! No finish came off

There's one mismatched knob, a few paint flecks and some finish loss at the base of the legs. Also, the center HV conductor is broken on the CRT socket. Otherwise, it's in very good condition.




Here I've removed the back for a look inside.


I pulled the chassis and was blown away at how clean it is. Easily the most pristine vintage TV chassis I've ever seen.
Other than a few tubes, not one single component has been replaced and all the metal surfaces are gleaming




Now for the best part. I did some basic checks and only found a bad thermistor. It looked fine, but measured open.

[url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/70039806@N00/8323592339/]Blonde

Once that was replaced, I slowly powered it up, did some tweaking, wiggled the bad CRT connector and it came alive.


Here it is after a little tweaking I figure a few new tubes and some fine tuning will get it running even better. Which leaves me to ponder how much I want to run it on all original parts