[BoomerBaby]

[font=Times New Roman][align=left]I have been visiting my mother this week, and at some point we began talking about the old Philco. I thought we had gotten it in 1955, but I looked it up and it is a 1953 model. I realize now that this was a HUGE set for back then! With the cabinet doors closed it looks unobtrusive, except for the finish on the cabinet. ((Yes, it is in the living room still.) While it has provision for external antenna hookup, it also has an internal antenna handle, top center of the back. Four positions, though they never did much... we needed rabbit ears for our Brooklyn apartment. It is still intact, mostly... my father and I replaced giant capacitors or resistors (do not recall which) when it was nine. Can still function, though it has a hard time doing vertical hold. That was never one of its strong points, though.
Here is a question that has bugged me since I was a kid: this TV has a 2 through 13 VHF tuner, but a metal plate between the left pair and right pair of control knobs, proclaims UHF. Why? It has no UHF tuner nor, as far as I have ever been able to find, any place for one to plug in.

[Big Dave]

UHF was an option. At the time, your Philco dealer could have installed a UHF tuner. There is likely an unused socket somewhere on the chassis. This would be where the UHF tuner would have plugged in. As far as the vertical, Philco loved micamold caps. These were just as unreliable as the paper and plastic caps they used.

I restored a similar era Philco with new mylar and electrolytic caps. It performed like it was supposed to. If you have any questions or would like it restored, email me.

[BoomerBaby]

    Thanks for the info! I will try to attach a pic of that center plaque. (It sits in front of a routed out rectangle.) I am still "rediscovering" the quirks of the set by chatting with my mother and my sister. I do recall that it was given two reprieves: at one point my father wanted to turn the cabinet into a bar; at another point, he was considering making it into an aquarium. Neither idea panned out, so it was never gutted. I also have to chat with my cousins upstate: their parents had a slightly different model. Two differences: different speaker cloth, and there was an empty plastic case behind the UHF panel. (Ours did not swing down.) I know that I've is still in an outbuilding in their farm.