Hello and welcome to my vintage television and radio blog.
I decided to start this blog to show and share my hobby/passion and enjoyment that I get from working on and restoring old technology and electronics.
My interest in electronics began when I was young and used to bring radios and record players home from the dump and would play around with them which then usually ended up in me pulling the thing to bits and keeping just the knobs/valves and speaker.
But on the odd occasion I would have some success in getting something actually working which to a small boy was a big achievement.
As I got a bit older (around 10 or so) I started bringing old TV sets home but was always too scared to plug them in as I knew TV's put out high voltages and since I'd had a couple of decent zaps from radios, TV sets were definitely something to be wary of.
So again I would just pull out the valves and the speaker and throw the rest away.
Radios on the other hand were simpler to get going so I'd already had a small collection by this time.
One day I came home with a Philips valve TV (F2ZN chassis) and decided to pluck up the courage and see if I could get it going.
I removed the back cover and found a fuse blown, replaced it, plugged the TV in and waited thinking it would probably work....After about a minute or so the line output stage kicked in and there was a decent shower of sparks from around the PL504/PY88 area which gave me a hell of a fright and I couldn't turn it off fast enough!
After I'd recovered from the fireworks display I then looked into what was going on and saw the board where the sparks came from there was this tall skinny capacitor with the top blown off, so I dug around in my junk box and ironically I had something that looked similar so I removed the blown cap and put this new one in and nervously switched the set on and waited.....A minute or so passed and everything seem to be warming up as normal (had my finger poised on power switch just in case there were sparks again) but then to my surprise sound and snowy picture appeared on the screen!! I couldn't believe that I'd actually fixed a TV and that was it I was hooked! As you can guess now I was bringing TV's home now much to my Dad's delight!
Since those early childhood days I've been collecting old radios for close on 20 years and stereo equipment for about 15 years or so. I'm now 38 so its been pretty much a lifetime of collecting in a sense!
During this time I've had heaps of TV's which have been mainly colour and I used to them fix up and on sell like Philips K9/KT2/KT3/KL9 National M8/M11/M12 and Pye CT102/103/104 and Thorn 9200/9600's etc... I acquired a lot of black and white's back then but most had failed line output transformers and or tired picture tubes and the likes so they got scrapped for parts generally.
I started to focus on black and white sets again around 1998/99 as I knew that they were already becoming a thing of the past. There were still a lot of old colour sets still going back then so I figured that they will still be around for a while yet. Those colour sets that I used to play with have also now disappeared it seems.
During the last five years I have seriously started collecting and acquiring more sets. I concentrate New Zealand made sets only and anything other set thats interesting or foreign if it turns up in this neck of the woods.
I will attempt to list all of my TVs on here with photos and a description about them and document any work or restoration that is done over time. Eventually I will do the same with my old radios and anything else interesting too.
Some other things I collect and enjoy are those 1960's Tektronix 5 series scopes (room heaters) and Sansui/Pioneer hifi gear from the 1970's period. Also into valve amplifiers have a Leak Stereo 20, Quad II's and a couple of Pioneer/Sansui/Trio stereo valve amps/receivers and own a few Akai reel to reels too.
Also have a collection of old LCD Seiko/Casio watches, nothing like wearing something retro looking on your wrist!
So there's a bit about me and what I do in my spare time, am an electronics technician by trade so pretty much live and breath this sort of thing... You could call it an obsession.... I call it a 'disease'!
Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy following this blog.
Cheers! Glen.
