05-13-2016, 12:53 AM
(05-12-2016, 07:23 AM)JimZ Wrote: Cant beat that find easily. Fairly uncommon and absolutely keep it. You can find the model but not alot of info here on those RCA "tulip" grill sets. With no cracks or case damage and complete chassis/good dial/knobs thats gotta be worth 4 figures to a catalin collector.
http://www.goldenhue.net/
I believe the backs have been reproduced.
I base that $ value on one sold at radio attic some years ago that went for 1500.
Radio Attic only posts asking prices, not sale prices. I don't want to be a pooper as $60 was still a great deal for an all original catalin, but the catalin market has been in the garbage can for years, thanks to at least one unscrupulous dealer. This dealer would buy up badly damaged catalins, sort of patch up the cabinets, not tell anyone that they were repaired, and then employed use of photoshop to make his sets look much better then they really were. Another fraud was to mix and match trim parts on sets like Fada 1000 bullets and on Addisons to create "Rare factory colour combos" that never existed. As a result the values of most sets have fallen to less then half what they once were at the height of the boom, some to less then one third.
If this set were mine I would restore it as it was the day it left the RCA factory. Yes you can swap in different tubes to add up to the 120 volt line voltage but keep in mind that catalin can discolor and deform with heat, and both the 50L6 and 50Y6 are very hot running tubes that you would be playing inside a very compact cabinet. What I would do since you can't really get a "curtain burner" cord anymore, is to rig up the line dropper outboard of the chassis in a project box with a capacitive dropper inside, or a bucking transformer inside to drop the line voltage down to 63 volts.
Another possibility would be to use a diode dropper (actually two 3 amp diodes in series) and some resistors for the pilot lamp tap, and also a current limiting thermistor as the diode dropper is kind of hard on the tube filaments.
A capacitor dropper may even fit, paradoxically a smaller value capacitor creates a larger AC drop, and with four tubes adding up to 63 volts you will need to drop 57 volts, less if it has a pilot lamp. These days they are making large value plastic film capacitors pretty compact.
Regards
Arran