1956 General Electric Portable Television

I have many hobbies. One of these is vintage vacuum tube based electronics. Last weekend I completed the restoration of this television.

It is a General Electric model 14T009. Originally it was red and white but the top was very rusty so I repainted it over the weekend to the turquoise you see here. I restored the electronics inside last year. Restoration of the electronics involved replacing all the old paper and electrolytic capacitors plus a surprisingly large amount of  bad tubes. Whenever you see a unrestored piece of electronics from the mid 60s or earlier 95% of all problems are caused by bad capacitors (starting in the mid 60s they started to transition to polypropylene film capacitors which rarely go bad like the paper ones). Once restored old TV’s are pretty reliable. Its a lot of fun to watch old TV shows on a old TV!

L.C. Smith 5

Remember this?

Well I finally got it.  According to the TWDB serial number database it is a 1912 machine and a early one at that. However it was disappointing to see a large chunk taken out of the platen. So for the first time ever I sent the platen out to be recovered. While it was away I borrowed the platen from my 1930 #8 to test it.

Here it is cleaned up a bit along with the new platen. It types well with the new platen. It, unlike all the other LC Smiths does not need at least 2 sheets of paper.

I also have been working on another non-typewriter project recently. It will get its own post when its finished.