[Pamphonica]

Being mainly a radio and audio restorer, this was my first full TV restoration. I am NOT familiar at all with TVs so it was an interesting voyage of discovery, and took me an elapsed year of odd hours here and there to fix. The set was requested by my close friend Nick, the son of Paul Taylor, co-founder of Pamphonic (in 1931), so I wanted it to end up just right, and reliable.

Ebay provided a donor, a bit dearer than I had hoped, but in lovely cosmetic condition, requiring only a thorough inside and out clean. The high-gloss case finish was incredibly good and virtually un-scarred, amazingly. The tube proved in excellent condition, only slightly marred by the discoloured "polaroid" front screen.

I splashed out on an Aurora, and quickly found that I had to reduce the output by 12dB as it was definitely overloading the TV (sound on picture). I also acquired a set of the excellent 4 volume Television Servicing by Patchett and started reading!

On cautious run-up on a variac, I got some sounds of life but nothing impressive. The HT was being dragged down. Finally, re-seating a valve in the tuner cured the HT fault (but see later!), and I got a raster, but incomplete frame scan. Voltages were about right (HT still low) , but no sync, and compressed field at bottom.

At this stage Chris Wood and Brian Summers kindly came up with quantities of spare valves which were very helpful. And I found a copy of the excellent original Pamphonic service manual (28 pages or so!) on Ebay - a real godsend compared to Trader sheets.

I methodically replaced all the waxy and hunts capacitors, especially the very oozy ones in the line ouput section, & changed a valve ( PCF80), and replaced the "piece of wire" fuse, checking after each couple of items. I also checked resistor values, changed over-value ones and re-checked specified voltages at valve pins (with an Avo 8). Now I had a picture for a while but it kept vanishing after a few minutes. Occasionally changing channels to and fro helped. I suspected a tuner fault as the tuner output signal was vanishing.

More capacitor replacing (mainly electrolytics) and the removal of an old bodge round the horizontal hold pot (R77 - replaced) resulted in a better picture but still this wretched intermittent fault! All voltages fine but sync still a bit iffy. (This version of the Pam 600 has no flywheel sync). I also cleaned all valve bases with DeOxit on a fine brush, and re-tightened the contacts which stopped all the odd crackles.

Breakthrough...! I removed the lid of the tuner and shone a bright light inside. There, lurking on top of the pcb was a loose solder splash, which had been moving in and out of various valve pins. Aaaargh! Anyway, splash extracted and intermittent fault solved. Just the weak sync to sort out.

The project had to be put aside for about 6 months at this point. Finally, with encouragement from Chris Wood and Len Smyth, I worked methodically through the sync chain and found an open-circuit cap I'd missed, in series with the sync signal (C20). I replaced that and the associated diode and voila - fabulous, locked picture. Len suggested I replace the PL84 to cure a slow picture growth on start-up, and that was it.

Back in its case for probably the 20th time in 9 months and off it went to Nick Taylor, who was over the moon. The picture is sharp and bright.

I know many here would have got it working in an afternoon, but for me it was a steep learning curve, and incredibly satisfying when I had finally restored it all myself.

Thanks to so many people here for their encouragement and help. I am no longer a TV virgin!

-Jeremy