Took a trip to Newark earlier today, as the antiques fair (iacf) was on, the weather was awful!! Very windy, cold and occasional snow showers, which had made most of the sellers pack up early. Still quite a bit of nice stuff around, but prices were somewhat optimistic. Now I hadn’t even spotted this, I’d taken Mum with me, as she wanted some lights for the kitchen (we didn’t find any!), she spotted it! I went over and asked how much, as the seller was busy stuffing things into the back of a lorry, the reply was £50, I asked if they would take £40, to which they said ‘yeah, go on then..’
I haven’t ever had a GEC TV to work on before! I’m hoping the tube is good, that will be tested first, if it’s no good then I’ll probably just dump the set in the lock up. It’s going to need some cabinet work, some veneer has gone awol, probably done recently, and not helped by the snow and rain that it was left out in! There’s some old worm holes too to fill and make sure the worms are dead.
anyway, a couple of rubbish photos! I also got a little French Philips radio too.
Regards
Lloyd
Just had a sneaky peek inside it, seems to be full of grass seeds?!
Gave the tube neck a wipe too, it doesn’t look good 🙁
I’ll get it to the workshop later and stick some volts up it and see if the heater glows, if it does then I’ll stick the Megger on it and see if it can produce a blob!
Regards
Lloyd
Just uploaded to the data library, the Trader sheet data for this TV for those that wish to follow along with Lloyds repair.
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That is a nice find LLoyd! GEC sets seem much less common than the usual Bush and Ekco offerings. Are you going to warm the LOPT up before applying power? Woodworm and the seeds suggest it has been stored in an outbuilding and has probably been damp. I wonder how many years it has been since it was last used?
Rich
Thanks for uploading the manual Chris 🙂 I'll have a look in a bit!
Certainly don't see many of the GEC sets about, one of the reasons I went for it, a quick google doesn't bring up much about them at all, just Radiomuseum and Jon'z valve page, both of which confirm Cathovisor's date of 1951 🙂 I think LOPT warming will be performed on it, hopefully there aren't any mice in it! If there are then the cat will be taking a serious interest in the set!!
I'm no expert on CRT getters, I think I've seen some like this on other tubes too, I even have a Mullard 9" that has a milky looking getter and it produces one of the best pictures I've seen on such a tube. It'll be interesting to see what it does when I get some power into it, place your bets now! Blue glow from the screen or the neck?!
Regards,
lloyd
Hi Lloyd,
link to the vintage-radio TV forum. The restoration of a GEC BT5144. August 2017.
Gec 12" bt5144. - UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration Discussion Forum (vintage-radio.net)
Till Eulenspiegel.
Hi David,
Your GEC came up fantastic! I’m pleased you went into detail of how the CRT is mounted in your thread, I was wondering what was holding it! If this set produces a picture as good as yours I’ll be very happy! I’ve noticed the implosion glass has slipped down in my set, and I see yours has the GEC badge printed on the bottom, I hope mine has too.
Regards
Lloyd
@lloyd I wouldn't worry too much about the condition of the tube until you get a picture on it. I don't test tubes anymore prior to restoration as I found tubes that tested poor or really poor actually gave reasonable pictures. I also tried Vrat's non destructive reactivation method on a mono tube recently that was fairly poor, and it came up like new and so far has held up perfectly. I have a 17" set that the tube neck looks very discoloured around end of the neck as if it has been very well used and it has excellent emission. Some of my older sets are a little slow for the picture to 'get going', my working TV22 is like that and is a bit dim with a fairly noticeable ion burn but it is fine, it is showing it's age and has had a life, nothing wrong with that!
I will follow the restoration of your GEC with great interest!
Hi Rich,
I’ve had a few sets with tubes that test as lousy, but actually produce a good picture, one was an Ekco T368, B&K had it in the red, but the picture on it is perfectly OK! I just wanted to make sure this sets tube isn’t a bag of air before I start!
I still haven’t managed to make room on the bench for it yet, so I bought the workshop to the set instead! Dragged the little Thurlby PSU, the Megger, multimeter and some croc clip leads into the house and put the set on the dining room table. Checked the manual for the CRT connections, checked for heater continuity, which is good, and then wired in the PSU, set it to 300mA, and wound up the voltage to 6.3V. The heater glows nicely 🙂 I connected up the Megger between the anode and cathode to see if I could make a blob on screen, but nothing was visible, on most tubes you can produce some sort of glow, but I have also had another tube which produced a naff looking dull blob, but then when in a set produced an absolutely fantastic picture! It probably didn’t help that the anode lead to the EHT rectifier is open circuit, but once I’d worked out how the anode connector came off (it’s a funny looking little nipple thing!) and tried a direct connection to the tube it still didn’t produce any light. At least the tube isn’t full of air! After over half an hour running whilst I was messing about the tube neck was only just luke warm, which I would say is a good sign, I’ve had gassy valves before where the bottle would get very hot with just the heater powered in just a few minutes.
Next job, get it to the bench and get some current flowing through the LOPT, but before that happens I’ve got to help my Dad put up a new ceiling in the kitchen, we have only been waiting since 2017 to do it!
Regards
Lloyd
Ah yes, I see the differences now, the 5144 has shaped wooden mouldings with just the flat surface’s veneered, and the 5145 has the veneer following the curves, also the knobs are bigger on the 5145 with imprinted legends for volume on off and brightness. It’s a shame that big chunk of veneer is missing from mine! It’s not going to be easy to replace, there is also a long strip down the side of the cabinet pulled off, but most of it is still there so can be glued back down easily.
Regards,
Lloyd
@lloyd That is a great way to test if a tube is intact! Let's hope it will prove to be OK. I have a mis-trust of tube testers, particularly the B&K which always seems to read low or very low on mono tubes. At first I thought it may have been a calibration issue with the one I used but I have since heard from others who have found the same they can't all need recalibration , I don't know if this is even possible to do. Best to trust your eyes!
Two Colour sets I have restored (repaired is probably a better description) recently had low-ish tubes but after a run on 7 volts they came back very well and have so far stayed good. You were lucky to find an Ekco with a good tube, If it is a Mazda very lucky!
Threw my B&K 467 in the bin last week, total waste of time in my opinion unless you want to just test for shorts. Never gave a good result with any of the black and white tubes. What made me finally decide was the recent video Shango066 uploaded in which he tested a colour CRT apparently showing no cut off and poor emissions. At which point he decided to try another tester that did show the tube had cut off and good emission !, the set went on to display a decent picture.
Have to admit it should have been binned many years ago, like every one else did.
Have to say, I totally disagree, and I'm quite taken aback by that sweeping declaration. As for quoting shango as a shining example, well, even he says he needs to read the manual from time to time, maybe the cut-off section might help him.
I have used my B&K for many years, and it has reliably informed me of emissions, cut-off, tracking etc. I've always checked its results against my Leader, which also agreed with the B&K results. It also has that wonderful feature of clean & balance, and has sorted out many colour tubes for me, proof in all my threads.
However, others and I have mentioned until we were blue in the face, the B&K is less than truthful when testing B&W. This was even known back in the day, and mentioned to me when I bought my B&K of the original owner, who was a local TV engineer. So I'm hardly surprised it's not been helpful to people who collect late 40s early 50s TV's.
And as for everyone else binning theirs, examples please, not hearsay.
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I have found mine generally of great use, but like any measuring equipment, it needs to be in proper full working order. In fact this is pretty essential because you don't want to run the risk of damage to a CRT.
Looking forward to seeing how you get on with the GEC Lloyd, looks an interesting set. 👍
To understand the black art of electronics is to understand witchcraft. Andrew.
like any measuring equipment, it needs to be in proper full working order.
Abso-bloomin-lutely 👍 If anyone is experiencing little or no G2 control, they need to check a whole raft of components in that part of the circuit. Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, Q5, Q6 and Q7. IC1A, IC1B, I2C, IC2D, C11, C12 and the cut -off pots themselves, R49, R50 & R51 before condemning the tester as bad. To do otherwise, is like someone with little TV repair experience dumping a TV because they failed to obtain line lock.
Yep, I agree, let's get this back on track with Lloyds TV
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However, others and I have mentioned until we were blue in the face, the B&K is less than truthful when testing B&W.
As far as I can tell, that's because the B&K is geared towards tubes with high emission cathodes. The average older mono CRT gives generally about 200uA cathode current for a really good example.
The real downside of the B&K is that it can't test triode tubes.
Personally, I want to see Lloyd's set produce pictures. I've only restored one post-war GEC, the little Bakelite BT2147 - which gave a very good account of itself. Alarmingly, that was over 20 years ago!
