This is a 1958 RCA with a CTC-7 Chassis and a 21" CRT.

It uses 28 Tubes and draws a whopping 380 watts of power, roughly twice what a modern 27 inch TV uses. Back in 1958 electricity was cheap!

Please excuse the poor pictures but with a set this heavy I can't just pick it up and move it to a better location, I just shoot it where it sits!

Note the legs have been removed temporarily so they won't get broken.

This is the CTC-7 chassis, a huge heavy thing!
It normally mounts vertically in the cabinet, but is laying flat in the picture.

I really couldn't have asked for a nicer chassis, this one is very clean and free of corrosion.

A quick inspection however turned up a possibly fatal flaw, the Flyback Transformer had a hole burned through the rubber cover. More about that soon!

Update! Someone from the Antique Radio Forum suggested the Flyback may not be as bad as it looked.
He suggested removing the old rubber covering and redoing it with a special, non corrosive, high dielectric Silicone Rubber.

With nothing to lose I gave it a try. I found the old covering was very easy to remove, after carefully splitting it with a sharp blade, taking care not to cut the windings, it simply peeled off.

In this Picture you can see it looks much better, just a small burn in the paper insulation really.

I took about a week applying several heavy coats of the Silicone, allowing it to cure completly between coats.

The only way to find out if this was going to work was to put it back in the chassis and try to run it, but before i could do that I had to do some work on the chassis, it was in no shape to power up.

My first attempts to check the chassis led to the destruction of one of the 5U4 rectifiers due to a short in one of the filter capacitiors, fortunately nothing else (like the power transformer) was damaged. I decided to replace all the Electrolytics before I made another attempt, I also replaced all the paper caps that were directly connected to the Flyback.

After replacing the Caps, and reinstalling the Flyback I put the chassis back in the cabinet for a test run. This is always a bit nerve wracking, you never know when something might go up in smoke or let go with a big bang, particularly when the chassis is this complicated and there is 22,500 volts involved, I wasn't disappointed, shortly after powering the set up I was greeted with a loud zap and an arc near the CRT! this wasn't a bad thing in this case, it was high voltage arcing to the metal CRT shield because I had forgot to put the Plastic anode cover back in place, scary but it meant the Flyback was producing High Voltage. After replacing the plastic cover I tried again, this time there were no nasty surprises, the set powered up and produced some light on the screen, although there was no Vertical sweep. I turned down the brightness to prevent damaging the CRT and allowed the set to run while I watched closely for signs of trouble. After about 5 minutes with nothing bad happening I shut it down. The Flyback was still perfectly cool and hadn't arced or burned, success! for now at least, it could still cause problems later but I am encouraged enough to continue with this set.

After replacing all the Capacitors I have gotten to the point where the set comes on and has a raster and even a weak picture of sorts. It has reached the point where I will have to make some extension cables so I can operate the chassis out of the cabinet and make some adjustments and check some voltages.

A bit of progress!

I recently picked up an original RCASales Brochure that includes a picture and description of this model, along with someones penciled in note that it cost $750.00