Hello— Your pages sure bring back memories of 1956. That year, Radio-Electronics published the Colordaptor kit project. I bought the coil kit for $44. (Lotta money back then.) I built the tube chassis: 40" Masonite wheel turning 600 rpm on an old, Sparton 17" TV. I never will forget my first color pix: Monday night—8pm—Lux Theatre. Beautiful, blue-eyed blonde with red lipstick. Wow! First color TV set in this town. Had gelatin filters at first. Then they shrunk and broke loose. Threw 12AU7s all over the room. Used cellophane after that episode. Still have the chassis in the attic. —And the same wife. —LOL. Thanks for a gr8 article. —"Ole Cajun" RudyB Jim: Does your Colordaptor still work? Do you still have the Sparton TV? Sparton seems to make fine products. Rudy: I don't have the wheel or the Sparton 17" TV (5 stages of IF) anymore. Later, I rigged up an old, 1952 Philips / Norelco projection TV set. |
Rudy Borel crafted this fine Colordaptor chassis
|
I used a six-inch, three-color wheel (1200 rpm) over the one-inch CRT. The second anode ran at 30 kV. I hate to think about the x-rays flying around! The oil-filled tripler fried and shut that project down.
In the garage, I was looking at an old Mitsubishi, 54-inch CRT junk set. I wonder about a 10-inch color wheel over one of the four-inch CRT lenses. Getting too old for this stuff.
Jim: Do you still have the Colordaptor chroma amplifier? It's a one-tube job that connects to the main chassis by cable.
Rudy: No. With five stages of IF in the Sparton, I didn't need the amplifier.
Jim: I notice a trimmer capacitor on the right side of your chassis. Do you use this capacitor to adjust the picture hue? Would this part be tuning capacitor TC12?
Rudy: Gosh, James. That was 40 years ago! But I think it's a large padder type cap, approximately 330 pF. It probably is a tint adjustment. I remember using it quite a bit. That's the reason it is accessible with the chassis upright (the operating position). Back then, TV station tint, color controls, etc. were not too stable.
By the way, I plugged in the chassis and everything lit up. The B+ is OK. Then I put the chassis back in the attic. I don't have a wheel to try it out.
Colordaptor chassis. (Rudy's version has an extra electrolytic can above tube V3.)