I'm writing this seven years after this clip was recorded. I don't know by now it that tv set was restored later, but it calls me to some reflections. That device was popular (cheap), hand built by american handwork. After sixty years, obsolete and neglected, it is still functional just by changing some leaky caps, just because that stuff like this deserves to be preserved an restored, even a televisor berreta (sorry my argentinism, a cheap tv set) like this. Today the consummer electronics all around the world is made in china, even the camera, the replacement caps and the test instruments used in this clip. None of that stuff will be able to be restored in sixty years. Global chinese manufacturing brings global unemployment and inequity, but don't blame the chinese, no! It's just the capitalists that want to maximise their profit no matter the cost.
Nice! A friend, who started fixing TV's in the early '70's, said that there were some flop house motels that were still using those old Muntz B&W's and he called them "the gutless wonder".
Bob Pease wrote a column on Muntz, claimed he'd roam the lab with a pair of wire cutters snipping out components and seeing if the set still worked, if so the part was deleted. Bob also said the sets had bad sensitivity but since most customers lived in the city with strong signals they didn't notice.
'Muntzing' or 'Muntzed' use to be a slang term for making something bare bones. These early Muntz sets are as responsible as RCA's Sarnoff for "TV" (yeah, Muntz coined that term) becoming popular, costing 1/4 or less as much as the competition. Muntz was the first to sell millions of units, when everyone else sold thousands or less. Early Muntz sets are historic, the TV's that made it worth investing in building broadcast stations. BTW, fine tuning is behind the trim plate behind the knobs!
At least the savings were passed on to the consumer! Today everyone buys cheap from China and maximize their profits by selling at crazy high prices to us! GREED!
Needs all the tubes tested. Haha all 6 of them. You have to give Muntz some credit for making a "Model T" type TV set that was affordable and operational. That picture looks pretty good, too.
Wow, this is what I call an antique TV, non of this square picture junk. I would love one, however they never made it to my part of the world. I like how Muntz simplified the hell out of the circuit, you could easily hide a digital receiver in there.
Your a really good technician👍 you know how to restore an old vintage television other people will stone it and hammering it sometimes they will overvoltage it until the smoke will come out and they were laughing.
Look at those humongous dials . Wow ! My mom was 18 when this set was new and my dad 21 . Top songs that year : Mona Lisa by Nat King Cole and Music , Music , Music by Theresa Brewer
In 1957 at 15 yrs. old I repaired this same set, as I worked in a drugstore after school and the owner was a repairman. what he did when people came in to test their tubes and they tested good he gave them a book that would show how to do the repair and after they did the repair they bought it to him. also my father bought one for $5.00 down and $5.00 a week . thanks for the memory
I am surprised that the IF strips in these Muntz TVs don't oscillate like crazy, since NONE of the IF transformers are shielded! The shielded can that we see on the chassis is the 4.5 MHz sound discriminator transformer. I bet that using one of these sets was a real pain if one had a neighbor with an amateur radio station or if one lived close to an AM broadcast transmitter. I happened to find the schematics to some Muntz TVs online, and some of the things that the engineers did to minimize the parts count were really ingenious.
I was surprised at the picture quality of this set, despite the simplicity of its circuitry. I'm looking forward to replacing all the capacitors and seeing what its capable of.
Nice start, like you said all the critical stuff is operational. Muntz really did some interesting stuff to bring the parts count WAY down and still have a working TV.
That photo you found in there makes me think of that movie White Heat, "I made it Ma...I'm on top of the world! I'm on top of the world, Ma!" Kind of surprised it has a power transformer instead of a series string and dropping resistors since it's a Madman Muntz bare minimum set.
He certainly would have tried to eliminate the power transformer, but probably couldn't put together a suitable tube complement from available tubes at the time for the series string. Later on, TV sets with filament series strings were produced. I've seen them in the so called portable TV sets manufactured in the late 1950s, used to both reduce the weight and cost. (At the time, any TV with a carrying handle was called a portable TV, even if it took the strength of Charles Atlas to pick it up.)
Look at the tuner from the front with the knob removed you will find a small hole that can be seen from the front of the set with the chassis installed, You must turn the slotted slug to "fine tune" the set using a brass screw driver. This was a common feature of many sets of that vintage.
Someone in town is getting rid of one of these, thought I might have a go, but you've convinced me I don't know nearly enough to do anything with it. I think the JPL mug was the final straw! Thanks for posting.
I am curious I've been looking at classic radios is it worth it repairing anything older then 1930 or does it become a total goose hunt for parts because something that old would be a pain to find parts for?
Most electrical parts are clearly specified, and standard replacements can be found. Radio tubes were mass-manufactured in the day, and old stock still exists, the commoner ones available for pocket change. Picture tubes are a different story, however,
That was a fun video! Thank you for posting it. You've reminded me that, someday, I want to get into the hobby of old radios, televisions, and the like. Lots of fun stuff to learn about!
realvanman1 , old stuff like this is fun to repair and use. Keep this in mind, though. Deadly high voltages are there in the set, so learn correctly and follow all safety precautions before working on one of these sets.
Shango, weren't MUNTZ TVs made in North Hollywood, near you? Also, as an old-time tech from the late 1970s who repaired mostly tube sets then, in defense of MUNTZ TV sets, sure they were cheap and did not perform as well as others, but MUNTZ was primarily designed for strong signal areas.
The fine tuning is that little control a bit above and to the right of the tuning shaft. If everything is in spec and not drifting due to being too old to take the heat, once you get that set right you should not have to mess with it.
I have a Muntz I need to restore. Decided to go with it as I've never done a TV restore, and figure with the minimalist approach, should be easier than let's say a Zenith or RCA
I wonder how those photo booth pictures ended up inside the TV. My mom has one of those photo strips of my two older brothers and myself taken in 1963. We were at Playland By The Beach In San Francisco and we were all little kids. We all took our little weenies out and made monster faces for the photo booth camera. My mom still laughs every time she looks at it.
Hi friend. Here in Brazil, we have a huge lack of components from older TVs. It was a doubt. Would it be possible to replace a tube TV flyback (horizontal output transformer) with a more modern TV flyback (Colored Tube), for example? Congratulations on the restorations and receive a hug from the Brazilian friend.
That TV looks like something that fell off John Logie Baird's work bench & still shows 'The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet' when turned on. The CRT is a round bulb & that bronze color tube surround makes the TV look at least five years older. What is the deflection angle of a CRT like this? I was used to monochrome 110 degree CRT's. I assume the round bulb added structural strength to the cone before the advent of the rimband.
Making a valve output stage self-oscillate to get a cheap T.V. timebase was used in Britain also (at least for frame) the drawback was that the height,linearity and hold controls would now interact with each other a lot more.
At least one Muntz TV model did not have vertical and horizontal oscillator circuits. (However, it looks like shango066's M169 did have those oscillators.) The timing was recovered from the pulses in the received TV signal. This strategy eliminated the vertical and horizontal hold controls, used to put the oscillators back in phase lock when they drifted. However, if the set was tuned to a vacant channel or signal from an active channel was lost, the absence of free running oscillators resulted in the screen going black. Strong airplane flutter would almost certainly cause the screen to go black temporarily. These sets must have been more susceptible to various kinds of electrical noise than sets with phase locked oscillators. I've never seen that sync design implemented in any other manufacturer's set. When signal is lost or not present, free running oscillators produce a raster. Some sets even had "noise inverters" to reduce instances of losing sync due to electrical noise.
WOW! That's a sweet ol' set! Hope you did a full restoration on it! That was nice of you to bring it up on a vari-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack you oughta know by now....sorry...Billy Joel got me for a moment, LOL....I got 5 year's worth of videos to go...we shall see...
Oh what a beautiful set! So proud of you for saving it from the trash. That would have just been a sin! I can't wait to see what you can do with it. Do you also sell the TV's that you fix? Do you transform them to where they can recieve the digital signals that we are limited to now? I'd give my eyetooth to have a real tv again!
If I were doing this I might take a more gradual approach as leaky capacitors are a definite issue; these old caps were not really that great and wax/paper, surprisingly perhaps, is not as moisture-proof as we might think. Diving in could finish up with a fire and more damage that might have been avoided. As for components, the most difficult is the CRT (oops! you guys call them kinescopes, don't you?) as my understanding is that there is no-one around able to reprocess even though some years ago it was not uncommon to find guys working on there own with the necessary vacuum gear in some quiet part of town. What a pity all that has gone and hope your project turned out well!
funny speaker wire goes outside and plugs in the back. only other tv i seen that had a wire go out for internal speaker was a jvc tv i think. the wire was for a sub that was in the tv.
I had one that had doors on it but the picture tube was bad the power transformer had a 5U4 tube on it. I may still have the transformer in the shed. Mine was in better shape except for the CRT. 73
Great Video!!!! Do you guys ever restore/repair vintage TV's for money? I've got a 1952 Sparton that I purchased in 1974 and used for many years....just stopped working, but I always liked the look of it and have had it in a bedroom for years. Might be something simple??? My Dad was an electrical engineer and built heath kit tv's and got this one running for me back in the 70's. I'd love to get it working again
ian forster , yes that transformer today is worth its weight in gold, figuratively speaking. Considering all the tubes typically in a TV in that day (18-21, or so) the transformer could handle a lot of current. High voltage windings could be anywhere from 500 to 800 volts, center tapped, at around 200 mA current, typical maximum.
I remember they called him mad man Muntz, I remember the jingle, There is something about a muntz TV, we think you'll all agree. He had a payment plan 1 dollar down and 1 dollar a week.
It's Fate could not be Bad ~ IT IS BEAUTIFUL! GREAT to know - OK! Doctor of Logic & Reason - Alex Jones of TV repair. ^ = ] Very much like the way you troubleshoot! Find the Cause Don't [just] treat Symptoms. ^ [heard Alex speak of Fluoride use..
I'm writing this seven years after this clip was recorded. I don't know by now it that tv set was restored later, but it calls me to some reflections. That device was popular (cheap), hand built by american handwork. After sixty years, obsolete and neglected, it is still functional just by changing some leaky caps, just because that stuff like this deserves to be preserved an restored, even a televisor berreta (sorry my argentinism, a cheap tv set) like this. Today the consummer electronics all around the world is made in china, even the camera, the replacement caps and the test instruments used in this clip. None of that stuff will be able to be restored in sixty years.
Global chinese manufacturing brings global unemployment and inequity, but don't blame the chinese, no! It's just the capitalists that want to maximise their profit no matter the cost.
Nice! A friend, who started fixing TV's in the early '70's, said that there were some flop house motels that were still using those old Muntz B&W's and he called them "the gutless wonder".
I was really suprised at how well the detail showed in the picture thats pretty impressive for a set this old
Ahh huh ahh huh ahh huh
Bob Pease wrote a column on Muntz, claimed he'd roam the lab with a pair of wire cutters snipping out components and seeing if the set still worked, if so the part was deleted. Bob also said the sets had bad sensitivity but since most customers lived in the city with strong signals they didn't notice.
'Muntzing' or 'Muntzed' use to be a slang term for making something bare bones. These early Muntz sets are as responsible as RCA's Sarnoff for "TV" (yeah, Muntz coined that term) becoming popular, costing 1/4 or less as much as the competition. Muntz was the first to sell millions of units, when everyone else sold thousands or less. Early Muntz sets are historic, the TV's that made it worth investing in building broadcast stations. BTW, fine tuning is behind the trim plate behind the knobs!
At least the savings were passed on to the consumer! Today everyone buys cheap from China and maximize their profits by selling at crazy high prices to us!
GREED!
Needs all the tubes tested. Haha all 6 of them. You have to give Muntz some credit for making a "Model T" type TV set that was affordable and operational. That picture looks pretty good, too.
Wow, this is what I call an antique TV, non of this square picture junk. I would love one, however they never made it to my part of the world.
I like how Muntz simplified the hell out of the circuit, you could easily hide a digital receiver in there.
Your a really good technician👍 you know how to restore an old vintage television other people will stone it and hammering it sometimes they will overvoltage it until the smoke will come out and they were laughing.
Look at those humongous dials . Wow !
My mom was 18 when this set was new and my dad 21 .
Top songs that year : Mona Lisa by Nat King Cole and Music , Music , Music by Theresa Brewer
Not sure why... but the minimalism of the design impressed me.
Today's young people will never know the struggle we had just to watch TV in our time huh?
In 1957 at 15 yrs. old I repaired this same set, as I worked in a drugstore after school and the owner was a repairman. what he did when people came in to test their tubes and they tested good he gave them a book that would show how to do the repair and after they did the repair they bought it to him. also my father bought one for $5.00 down and $5.00 a week . thanks for the memory
ayy your not alone dude
Same Here! I'm 17 and also have a little big Collection of TVs and Radios and love to repair.
Heh what a coincidence i just took apart some CRT TVs (the black ones from the 90s) Time to whip out the soldering iron!
Jesse Newby ok, .
I love fixin' this stuff up as well! (I'm 19)
Very surprising how something that simple can even work, picture looks really good too.
And those are pictures of the guy that stole the copper wiring out of the set...☺
Madman Muntz, funny I was told many years ago that when one of his TV's broke, repairmen would wonder how the thing ever worked.
I would love to see this set restored.
I am surprised that the IF strips in these Muntz TVs don't oscillate like crazy, since NONE of the IF transformers are shielded! The shielded can that we see on the chassis is the 4.5 MHz sound discriminator transformer. I bet that using one of these sets was a real pain if one had a neighbor with an amateur radio station or if one lived close to an AM broadcast transmitter.
I happened to find the schematics to some Muntz TVs online, and some of the things that the engineers did to minimize the parts count were really ingenious.
Good video! Been a while since I've seen a TV by "Mad Man" Muntz. I think it's a good candidate for restoration....
I liked your approach to evaluating this set.
I was surprised at the picture quality of this set, despite the simplicity of its circuitry. I'm looking forward to replacing all the capacitors and seeing what its capable of.
Nice start, like you said all the critical stuff is operational. Muntz really did some interesting stuff to bring the parts count WAY down and still have a working TV.
That photo you found in there makes me think of that movie White Heat, "I made it Ma...I'm on top of the world! I'm on top of the world, Ma!" Kind of surprised it has a power transformer instead of a series string and dropping resistors since it's a Madman Muntz bare minimum set.
He certainly would have tried to eliminate the power transformer, but probably couldn't put together a suitable tube complement from available tubes at the time for the series string. Later on, TV sets with filament series strings were produced. I've seen them in the so called portable TV sets manufactured in the late 1950s, used to both reduce the weight and cost. (At the time, any TV with a carrying handle was called a portable TV, even if it took the strength of Charles Atlas to pick it up.)
Look at the tuner from the front with the knob removed you will find a small hole that can be seen from the front of the set with the chassis installed,
You must turn the slotted slug to "fine tune" the set using a brass screw driver.
This was a common feature of many sets of that vintage.
Someone in town is getting rid of one of these, thought I might have a go, but you've convinced me I don't know nearly enough to do anything with it. I think the JPL mug was the final straw! Thanks for posting.
love the simplicity
wow I've only ever seen one of those televisions in my entire life so cool to see you working on it
I am curious I've been looking at classic radios is it worth it repairing anything older then 1930 or does it become a total goose hunt for parts because something that old would be a pain to find parts for?
Most electrical parts are clearly specified, and standard replacements can be found. Radio tubes were mass-manufactured in the day, and old stock still exists, the commoner ones available for pocket change. Picture tubes are a different story, however,
That was a fun video! Thank you for posting it. You've reminded me that, someday, I want to get into the hobby of old radios, televisions, and the like. Lots of fun stuff to learn about!
realvanman1 , old stuff like this is fun to repair and use. Keep this in mind, though. Deadly high voltages are there in the set, so learn correctly and follow all safety precautions before working on one of these sets.
glad ya saved it from the trash, works quite well!!
love it love the way you work
Shango, weren't MUNTZ TVs made in North Hollywood, near you? Also, as an old-time tech from the late 1970s who repaired mostly tube sets then, in defense of MUNTZ TV sets, sure they were cheap and did not perform as well as others, but MUNTZ was primarily designed for strong signal areas.
That's a cool Television Set.
The fine tuning is that little control a bit above and to the right of the tuning shaft. If everything is in spec and not drifting due to being too old to take the heat, once you get that set right you should not have to mess with it.
Great work and video, glad you saved it
I have a Muntz I need to restore. Decided to go with it as I've never done a TV restore, and figure with the minimalist approach, should be easier than let's say a Zenith or RCA
Sensible
I wonder how those photo booth pictures ended up inside the TV. My mom has one of those photo strips of my two older brothers and myself taken in 1963. We were at Playland By The Beach In San Francisco and we were all little kids. We all took our little weenies out and made monster faces for the photo booth camera. My mom still laughs every time she looks at it.
“There is a brightener here, a brightener here, a photo booth strip Jimmy Durante pictures ...”
At least they used a Sarkes-Tarzian turret tuner in this Muntz, that was one of the better tuners of it's day, also used by Admiral.
I like how empty the set is. Nothing but wats needed to run. Love it,half a resistor.
Cant believe how less the components are in this set...
How do you clean all the dust off of the metal on those?
Mixture of decades, 3 generations of electronics.
Looks like this will come out well!
I have a 1950 Hoffman that I am considering restoration. I have the schematic. Any recommendations
for the L.A. area?
When I was a kid, I saw ads for Muntz sets and they had a poor reputation back then as cheap in price and cheap in quality.
Hi friend. Here in Brazil, we have a huge lack of components from older TVs. It was a doubt. Would it be possible to replace a tube TV flyback (horizontal output transformer) with a more modern TV flyback (Colored Tube), for example?
Congratulations on the restorations and receive a hug from the Brazilian friend.
the brain child of Madman Muntz, and it sounds like you know about him, he also brought us the 4 track tape player, and the Muntz Jet
Why is he called mad man muntz??
@@guitarpro248 He was also a used car salesman. He started the whole "prices so low I must be crazy" pitch.
I was surprised it came on great video
“ there’s something about a muntz TV, in oh so many ways”.
The similarity between Muntz and football, they both need a quarter back!
I sure hope you restore it, I have never seen a muntz that old !
For sets that are too far gone, do you save/pillage useful components out of them?
I LIKE YOUR SHOWS
There’s something about a Muntz TV!
Маленькие трансформаторы! Помню советские телевизоры, там ТС180 и ТС270 стояли, что собственно и определяли вес самого телевизора.
a nice old TV!!
You would have driven me nuts, like other techs in my shop who had to have the sound turned up on every set they worked on.
That TV looks like something that fell off John Logie Baird's work bench & still shows 'The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet' when turned on.
The CRT is a round bulb & that bronze color tube surround makes the TV look at least five years older.
What is the deflection angle of a CRT like this? I was used to monochrome 110 degree CRT's.
I assume the round bulb added structural strength to the cone before the advent of the rimband.
Super super super 😊😊😊😊
Looks to me like a bad power supply filter because of the weave in the raster and the hum in the audio?
Making a valve output stage self-oscillate to get a cheap T.V. timebase was used in Britain also (at least for frame) the drawback was that the height,linearity and hold controls would now interact with each other a lot more.
At least one Muntz TV model did not have vertical and horizontal oscillator circuits. (However, it looks like shango066's M169 did have those oscillators.) The timing was recovered from the pulses in the received TV signal. This strategy eliminated the vertical and horizontal hold controls, used to put the oscillators back in phase lock when they drifted. However, if the set was tuned to a vacant channel or signal from an active channel was lost, the absence of free running oscillators resulted in the screen going black. Strong airplane flutter would almost certainly cause the screen to go black temporarily. These sets must have been more susceptible to various kinds of electrical noise than sets with phase locked oscillators.
I've never seen that sync design implemented in any other manufacturer's set. When signal is lost or not present, free running oscillators produce a raster. Some sets even had "noise inverters" to reduce instances of losing sync due to electrical noise.
dude u are awsome
I went to a radio tv store cleanout, but very few tvs were there. Just piles of pieces, knobs, washing machine parts & dropped radios.
Reminds me of my childhood.
That's a cool classic set... bare-minimum circuity... gets the job done and save on the purchase price... that was the theory, any way. :-)
Looks like a nice vintage set. What year is it from?
that photobooth snapshot looks like the stuff of nightmares. {twilight zone theme}
WOW! That's a sweet ol' set! Hope you did a full restoration on it! That was nice of you to bring it up on a vari-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack you oughta know by now....sorry...Billy Joel got me for a moment, LOL....I got 5 year's worth of videos to go...we shall see...
I FUCKING LOVE UR VIDEOS MAN I LEARN SO MUCH FROM U
Nyce !
Oh what a beautiful set! So proud of you for saving it from the trash. That would have just been a sin! I can't wait to see what you can do with it. Do you also sell the TV's that you fix? Do you transform them to where they can recieve the digital signals that we are limited to now? I'd give my eyetooth to have a real tv again!
I'd like to do some sinful things to you
@@josephbeasley5193 wtf is that suppost to mean?!
abandon bilding way explain things is awsome
If I were doing this I might take a more gradual approach as leaky capacitors are a definite issue; these old caps were not really that great and wax/paper, surprisingly perhaps, is not as moisture-proof as we might think. Diving in could finish up with a fire and more damage that might have been avoided. As for components, the most difficult is the CRT (oops! you guys call them kinescopes, don't you?) as my understanding is that there is no-one around able to reprocess even though some years ago it was not uncommon to find guys working on there own with the necessary vacuum gear in some quiet part of town. What a pity all that has gone and hope your project turned out well!
Shango!, please can i have a copy of that cathode current tester for my tool kit
thank you
We have come a long way.
what is that old photo its neat
i cracked up at that photograph xD
+Fennec Fox (FennecTECH) ,,heh heh,,mugsy bugzhinsky,,straight outa the bronx
It's Gordon Ramsey the chef dressed as "Mugsy"
Mafia
funny speaker wire goes outside and plugs in the back. only other tv i seen that had a wire go out for internal speaker was a jvc tv i think. the wire was for a sub that was in the tv.
Was that Muntz in those photos????
I wish I had a wife who enjoyed watching this with me
I have never seen a vintage TV working. Although I appreciate this video, I'm very disappointed not to see it work properly. RATS!
I had one that had doors on it but the picture tube was bad the power transformer had a 5U4 tube on it. I may still have the transformer in the shed. Mine was in better shape except for the CRT. 73
Neil Patrick Harris is a time traveller?
Beautiful thank you kiss Brazil thank
FUN (for me to watch, that is) ;)
Great Video!!!! Do you guys ever restore/repair vintage TV's for money? I've got a 1952 Sparton that I purchased in 1974 and used for many years....just stopped working, but I always liked the look of it and have had it in a bedroom for years. Might be something simple??? My Dad was an electrical engineer and built heath kit tv's and got this one running for me back in the 70's. I'd love to get it working again
Any luck getting it running?
Madagascar, the Fossa attack scene toward 16:00s.
I have the Sams if you decide to go further with it.
good transformer for valve amps
ian forster , yes that transformer today is worth its weight in gold, figuratively speaking. Considering all the tubes typically in a TV in that day (18-21, or so) the transformer could handle a lot of current. High voltage windings could be anywhere from 500 to 800 volts, center tapped, at around 200 mA current, typical maximum.
Almost 9 years later. 20220412
1950
muntz is rare wow what a find,its like a dumont
Lol who the heck was the guy in the pics ?
I remember they called him mad man Muntz, I remember the jingle, There is something about a muntz TV, we think you'll all agree. He had a payment plan 1 dollar down and 1 dollar a week.
We called that thing the miuntz gutless wonder .had a strange horizontal oscillator circuit .similar to admiral otherwise..
It's Fate could not be Bad ~ IT IS BEAUTIFUL! GREAT to know - OK! Doctor of Logic & Reason - Alex Jones of TV repair. ^ = ]
Very much like the way you troubleshoot! Find the Cause Don't [just] treat Symptoms. ^ [heard Alex speak of Fluoride use..
What time's Hopalong Cassidy come on?
lol Alex Jones in the background. Infowars all the way!
How do you some of the really old CRTs work if they don’t have any deflection coils?
And what does an ion trap even do?
Traps ions in the CRT or kinescope. There is a magnet on the end of the trap. 73
Internal plates. Electrostatic charges for deflection.
Most minimal television circuit that I've ever seen.
That is agc overload and discriminator adjustment..New filter caps and couping caps should do it.