Modified 1963/65 Zenith Franken-Chancellor SC1600: All The Remote You Expected And Then Some 

Everything except the reverb.

Why it was tuned to a T like a fine toothed comb.

TV combos with tape recorder are quite rare, Combos with remote are rare, but I think there are more remote combos than TV combos with Tape. There are probably even fewer Remote TV combos with tape (every possible option) because each option alone (remote or tape) would add at least $100 to the set....Together those options would cost as much as a decent quality new 19" Black and White TV.

They're out there. Some places in the USA these combos go to the dump after begging for someone to take them. The key to finding them is looking in areas where there was a thriving middle class when these were new. It also is important that the area doesn't have too much population churn. The Midwest is full of nice industrial hamlets where there are several grandmas that have lived in the same house with the same console since 1962 and are about ready to let it go. Poorer places never had a high-end combo to begin with, and richer places often would trade it in every 5 years for 'The Next Best Thing" to hit the market.

@@tomcarlson3913 Yeah, I know. I live in an old poor section of the US (Ozark Mountains). Nobody here ever had anything back then. And most here today still don't. It really hurts to see RU-vid videos where they trash the guts out of them to make a stupid cat or dog house out of these grand sets.

@@JohnnyUmphress You might find one close by if you keep looking. Facebook Vintage TV market place and especially groups dedicated to stereo consoles tend to do a good job digging up TV combos from local marketplace postings and other sites. I live on the far west edge of what could be called the Milwaukee/Waukesha suburbs, and this Zenith combo was another half hour west by interstate in the middle of nowhere farmland. And my extremely rare Philco TV-123 www.earlytelevision.org/philco_tv-123.html came from even deeper Iowa farm country...They may be exceptions, but some sets still lurk in unexpected places. Couldn't agree more about the repurposer nonsense. last summer someone in Waukesha gutted a RCA 21CT55 there are only 40 known left, and collector demand is so high I had to practically beat other collectors away with a stick to get my $2k restorable barn find 21CT55 I since restored. I tried to save it the one that got repurposed, but they never answered my emails. They were asking a small pittance compared to what a collector would pay.

@@tomcarlson3913 Thanks for the information. I have been watching Craigslist closely for quite some time as well. I think I have covered most of the avenues that might possibly lead to a find. Down here it's a long waiting game.

@Johnny I have a black and white ill give you. The CRT is great so is the flyback most likely needs recapped. The cabinet is mint

Thanks! Zenith's Swing sampler was tastefully chosen. About half my LP collection (and %90 of my 78s) is Big Band/Swing and the rest primarily rock and roll from the beginning through the late 80's. I have a rough edit of an RCA CTC-16 resurrection in progress that will premiere sometime tomorrow if all goes as planned.

It's not about effort to opperate a set*. It's about the challenge of implementing features it never had and wasn't specifically designed to have. It's also about having a cool and unique feature that will prevent me from seeing another combo with some other cool feature and breaking my back to adopt another elephant (read that TV/stereo combo). *If it was about making it easy to opperate I could have just set a home theater amp with a volume controlled line out on top and a switched power outlet and achieved functionally the same thing faster.

Actually that's how all 45 RPM changers were originally meant to work...RCA who created the 45 RPM format made their first 2 45 RPM changers the RP-168 and RP-190 (I have examples of both) so that the top records would spin and there would be no overarm...On this Zenith because the 45RPM adapter is part of the platter (it folds up from it and clam shells around the LP/78 spindle) they imitated the RCA 45 changer arrangement. If the overarm was to be placed on the 45 stack the labels of the top 1-3 records would get scuffed. The label portion of the disc is thicker than the grooved portion to protect the grooves. One of the interesting things about Zenith's changer design is the looped overarm arm is basically only there to balance LPs and 78s...The shorter flag arm that swings out and senses record size before each drop also senses end of stack when the size it reads is about 1" smaller than a standard 45...Zenith could have deleted the circle overarm and gone with a balance disc like some 60's European changers had, but I'm glad they didn't as those balance discs often end up lost.

I order them based on whether I like both sides or only one (so some stacks get flipped and others get swapped for a different stack on completion) then based on what I think will make a nice playlist of songs. I haven't noted my Zenith double dropping though I have seen it on RCA RP-168 and 190 changers. I haven't really used a BSR with a 45 changer adapter to say how well or bad they handle it. I have encountered records that are too thick to drop at all or like to hang up mid drop...If it's not a valuable collector grade specimen I'll ream the label down near the hole and ream the hole as necessary to fix the problem. A lot of my 45s have had a rough life so most aren't going to loose significant value from a reaming.

Interesting video! Great mods. We had that same model and the bass on it really kicked!

Lightning is possible (granted from experience I would expect to see evidence of charring in the cabinet, which wasn't present) especially if they had a roof antenna (I don't remember anymore) as the highest point out in the farmhouse it came from. I doubt it would have been a dud from factory. Zenith engineered and built their sets as good or better than anyone else in the industry back then. I've heard about Zeniths being left out in the rain then being thrown in and out of junk trucks still working at the destination, and in another case surviving a house fire powered on the whole time and one of the firefighters noticing a flicker and wiping the soot off the screen to find a perfect picture beneath the soot. Out of over 25 Zenith TVs I have owned the only factory issues I have ever found were 2 sets where one of the power wires wasn't soldered to the tuner (sounds like the tuner line tech didn't like mondays)...The wire wrap was so good the sets lived a full life and still worked besides a pesky intermittent caused by the lack of solder.

Weakening the detent spring would help, but I don't want to mess with the feel of using the manual controls too much (weak detents make a switch or tuner feel like junk to me). One of the main issues to overcome is how cramped of a space it's in...especially after adding in the gears for the tuning and volume. I'm probably going to revisit this eventually, but I have enough projects and enough less free time that it's not in the foreseeable future.

@@tomcarlson3913 That thing is so huge you could fit 4 encyclopedia Titannnicas inside it's cabinets.

@@jockoharpo2622 LOL. it's definitely a big cabinet. But it's packed in places both by Zenith and by me. The knob shafts don't have any connection points under chassis, and I have roughly 1.5" of space between where the shafts exit the chassis and the inside of the tuner bezel in which to slide gears over the shafts or add levers to the shafts. And on the tuning and volume where I added those gears I had to dismantle part of the dial scale and work around the dial string. The companion gears (for the motor drive shafts) mount to a plate that places them such that the drive shafts travel above chassis snaking between tubes and IF cans. I can't as easily do that for the band switch because the tuning cap lives just above the band switch. Zenith never meant for anyone to do what I did, and some day when I get around to a "how the sausage is made" video on this and the Philips TT modifications I think you'll be surprised how much engineering electrical and mechanical I had to put in to this. Zenith actually backed the cabinet pretty dense. Because of the horn tweeters they couldn't fit record storage in the cabinet. The amp and tuner are on the same side and between those and the tweeters there's barely room for the optional reverb system my unit is missing (I think it's the only missing feature), and the motors almost touch the amp. The TV is pretty packed too, and adding the extra relays discretely to the remote wasn't easy. The phono side is about the only place a few books could hide especially without tubes setting them on fire....

@Tom Carlson but its a butte. Like Sutter is

@Tom Carlson What company built and sold the first stereophonic television set? I read this years ago. Not sure on how true it is. One clue it was a stereo tv turntable combo and about what year?

Haha. Only 1 year ago at most....So far. Ten years ago I didn't have a camera capable of HD...So a Zenith cataract removal I filmed then was recorded on good old digital-8 NTSC SD.

I think I explained the mechanism connecting the knobs to the motors in the video. The phono reject is just a solenoid connected via a gentle spring and dial cord (which is slack when the solenoid is off) to the arm trip. Stereo power on/off is a pair of 120V coil relays configured such that the on relay when pulled in feeds it's self coil voltage to stay pulled in and the off relay breaks that circuit. There's around 8 extra relays in their own box. The brains of the opperation being a 4 position volume stepper relay from another remote set. Looks like I'm at text limit...If there's interest I could make a circuit explanation video.

An average wood cabinet TV only console would be around $600 new back then. This was probably in the $850-1200 range new. Collectors today consider TV/Stereo combos the least desirable consoles because they take up so much room and weigh so much (With the TV out me and another strong guy really had to work to get it out of the Basement it was in). Professionally shipping these any distance exceeds monetary value so LOCAL market interest dictates value. In some regions you can't give these away. If you happen to live in a city with multiple TV collectors that want a combo and the cabinet and guts happen to be a desirable combination, and the CRT and condition are good you might be able to find a sucker who'll pay $500 on a REALLY good day. So far the most I have ever paid for a combo was $200 for my remote Danish Modern RCA CTC-16 stockholm. My Combos are not for sale, and I don't plan on ever selling them. I happened to REALLY want a Zenith Space Command combo with a tube amp. This one had UHF (which wasn't standard until mid 64) and TV HIFI tone controls which were optional on Zeniths, and going off the ad looked good and was 30 minutes away. The owner was one of those ask an INSANE price if you don't know the value types. I had the seller haggled down to $500 (the most I could ever to bring myself to pay for my ideal combo in perfect condition) then he vanished on the day I was going to see it with what may have been covid based on the later sorry message. A few months later after Vaccines became a thing it popped up again for $300 (still a lot, but in line with what I consider the value to me to be if condition was REALLY good), and I went to see it. The cabinet could use a refinish up top, the CRT was necked and I could see UGLY mods to the remote wiring inside, and based on that I almost walked, but I had to see what amp was in it before I left. It had the Push Pull tube amp in it and those are worth around $150 separate...That's what I ended up haggling down to as it was the only part of it worth any money if the TV happened to be un-restorable (which, had that been the case, would have likely meant me parting it out to recoup purchase price).

I still have it, but I have a strict policy to not sell something I've modified for myself...Also I'd never find another one.

Many, many people are these days. it's a sad fact of life, but it happens to the best of us at some point.

The box on the TV isn't a cable box but actually ATSC tuner (DTV converterbox) with NTSC output. I'm close to dropping cable Spectrum's decision to use encrypted QAM on every channel so every working cable tuner in the house has to be a $5+ a month rental on top of the cable subscription cost is blatant highway robbery IMO...They've done some other things to incur my ire too. I actually do feed my vintage TVs from a computer and from other HD sources through several methods. My main media PC has a graphics card that has NTSC S-Video output (and I've hoarded a number of those graphics cards to possibly build a multi-channel media PC in the future), but I rarely use that. My budget solution is to use an HDMI TO AV (NTSC AV) adapter from amazon to convert HD sources (like ROKU, Bluray and the HDMI / DVI outputs of a PC) to something my vintage TVs can play. That only outputs letterboxed NTSC which is good in some situations, annoying in others. A bandaid to that is to get an Extron IN1502 and a VGA to composite video adapter and use the pair to crop the video to full screen...There are disadvantages to it like Video delayed from sound, reduction in detail and motion artifacts in the scalers. My expensive solution is to use a HDMI to ATSC RF modulator ($250 used) to send ATSC to my DTV converter box then use the menus in the DTV converter box to select between Letterbox, Cropped, or Stretched scaling from the source depending on what I feel is most appropriate for the source material and my mood.

@@tomcarlson3913 Why didn't I think of the of the HDMI to NTSC converter to DTV converter box. I spent $50.00 on my HDMI converter and it still had the side letterbox look on my vintage sets. Go widescreen on my Digital Stream converters. I was racking my brain thinking how I was going to stretch the video.