CrustyTV Vintage Television Museum
Welcome
To my Vintage Colour Television Shop, Museum & collection, below are photos taken from my private museum come workshop. In these following photos, you’ll have a brief look around the shop. The main display areas are split over two levels. Top level, access to storeroom and upper display area, lower level, second display area, main workbench with components and access to garden.
Approximately 40ft long x 9ft wide, presented as a period TV shop from the 1970s, with plenty of shop period advertising, lighting, posters, brochures and other such memorabilia. There is an authentic shop feel about the place with background music system playing tunes on a period correct TP48 Reditune background system. It not only does it look and feel like a 70s TV shop, it smells like one and sounds now sounds like one.
I’ve been collecting and restoring vintage TVs for over 14-years now, the collection focuses on Colour Television, and covering a period from 1967 to 1986. So you’ll find the first colour televisions that were available to the public when the colour service launched in the UK. TVs such as the 25″ Dual-Standard Baird M702W & 19″ M708. The superb Thorn 2000 Dual-Standard in 19″ and 25″, the world’s first all transistor colour television. Many TVs from the boom years of the 1970s, including two super rare Thorn 4000-series sets, hardly if any of these survive in the UK. Of course the collection would not be complete with representation of VCR, Laser a CED, all which changed the face of home entertainment.
Not forgetting Teletext, which is represented by a number of early Teletext set-top boxes and of course televisions with it built in. The museum has its own signals, so test cards and 15 Teletext pages can be displayed on the TV’s
The museum and workshop project started as ‘lock-down’ project where I finally realised my ambition to get the collection out of a single storage room, into a purpose built display. This project was finally completed mid 2022 and, as you can see, already all available space has been used.
Come with me as we go back in time to the 1970s, and look around the TV shop.
To view each TV in detail, you’ll need to read the repair blogs
I like the new addition of the “Vintage television shop” a lot better with the photos to match the description and the updated repair blog lay out must’ve taken a bit of time but well worth it.
I love this place! One thing you unfortunately can’t experience through the internet (yet!) is the warm electronics smell that instantly hits you as you walk through the door!
I’ll have to see if I can manufacture some scratch- N-sniff cards to send out
what a fabulous collection, i only have a little collection of seven working black and white tv’s,
Absolutely fantastic display of TV’s and the advertising to go with them. As mentioned by someone the warm smell of electronics and dust and dried out back covers would be a delight on the nose. You deserve several pats on the back for all your work.
William
Nice set up. Good to see those things preserved. I am in Australia and there is a reason the Thorn 4000, or 4KA as we knew it, is rare. Terrible things. Certainly not made for the climate here and I think there was a lot of trouble trying to manufacture the thick films here. Not many survived beyond the 70s. I probably threw some of the last ones in existence on the tip in the early 2000s after a guy gave me a heap of old TVs he had under his house. They had an isolation transformer here, which was the only thing worth salvaging to make your own isolation transformed box for live chassis work. I remember there was a near new Thorn 3500 in the classroom of the technical college I went to in the early 90s, and I asked why have such an ancient TV there. The answer was that it was the only colour TV sold in Australia that was fully transistor circuitry, eg not a single IC in it, so you could learn all the circuitry in component form. They also had an isolation transformer you could use. AWA Thorn here quickly abandoned those chassis for Mitsubishi made televisions that were more reliable. I wasnt a fan of any European made TVs, but its nice to see some of those old chassis again.