Did Australia ever have a "Hot Chassis" (transformerless) TV? Was it legal?

Some of the earlier Ekco sets were from memory, though the later sets had transformers. European sets, like Sabas, would've been transformerless.

Chris

like Sabas

Seems Europe had more price competition compelling manufactures to drop the transformer - an appealing idea as TVs require large transformer with their very high filament current draw. Immigrants would sometimes bring Euro TV to Australia and they would turn up in service shops. Saw a British Pye in the late 60s in shop, no transformer, light cabinet, light back cover moulded from some king of pulp fibre! Cheap but very economical, advanced and not sacrificing performance, for instance it was resolving the final resolution grating (5MHz/400 lines?) on the ABC transmitted test pattern! Aussie sets were not doing this, only second to last grating resolved.

Australian televisions tended to be far less complex than European ones and the same seems to apply to radios. This was probably a compensating scenario. Transformers were also very cheap to make here. When you look inside a typical European telly you will see an absolute birds nest but a set made here will have far less inside it. Complexity wasn't limited to the Europeans though. Sets made by Rank Arena and Philips had similar complex arrangements. Circuit boards and wiring looms occupying as much space as possible inside the large cabinets they came in yet an equal sized AWA set with its links to Mitsubishi offered a single PCB with everything on it with wiring only for the picture tube, channel dials and other controls, loud speaker and transformer.

The simplicity in these sets, particularly those made in the 1980s would have eliminated numerous production bottlenecks thus reducing costs compared to other brands. In that era a power transformer would have cost $10.00 to make and be fitted to a set with a retail price of around $700.00 which was a fair bit of money at the time.

I am not sure about the legality of a hot chassis at the time. European sets were brought out here by boutique retailers aiming their wares at the upper end of the market and I imagine these would have been similar to what was on offer in places like the Great Britain and Germany. They wouldn't have been able to shift them without some sort of approval.

It was not common early on, but there have been quite a few hot chassis TV's on the Australian market since 1956. A few were even made by local manufacturers.
It was a lot more common with colour TV's and nearly all of the European import models were transformerless.
A lot of American / Japanese engineered sets were also sold here and most took the simple option of fitting a step down transformer instead of the cost of re-engineering the set to run of 240v. Some used the cheaper auto-transformer resulting in a hot chassis but most used proper isolated secondary transformers to avoid the wrath of the service community.

It was never illegal but it was frowned upon from various quarters, mainly because it was unusual and there were a few "accidents" with people trying to service them.

earlier Ekco sets

Looks like transformerless were the rule in UK even in the 1950s looking at my bound copies of Practical Television such as "Servicing AC/DC Receivers"(May 1957). Although, granted, a transformer chassis with 6.3v filaments is a better way to build a television, it is unclear what the motivation was for UK cost cutting except that it was the world's most experienced TV manufacturer, being first with TV broadcasting.

typical European telly you will see an absolute birds nest

Compare that to the mammoth premium Aus Philips & Kriesler horizontal chassis with big power tranny at one end c.1960! What would happen when Gough Whitlam would open the floodgates of foreign competition in 1975?

Pope 14" was Aussie hot chassis based on 1950s Motorola? Using insulators separating chassis from earthed metal cabinet. Saw bench tech get shock from one of these - got hand stuck between chassis and cabinet, had to suffer until someone disconnected power. By mid 1960s plastics were strong enough for cabinet (GE).

Dear New Vista.

Are you Australian?

Your posts sound leading.

From my own memories, when I was still young, many, many years ago, Astor had at least one live chassis B&W TV.

Pope Motorola had a live chassis portable TV. I would service these in the mid 1970's. They were fairly numerous. This was one model only. the 14P10.

Ekco had a live chassis TV it had two versions. One for Victoria, which had stricter regulations than other states, "full wave rectification was mandatory" and a more relaxed version for the other states.

When colour TV came along in 1974, note I did not say 1975, Korting, Nordmende, and Blaupunkt had to change to full wave rectification. I think that Luxor did not have to alter their circuitry.

I look forward to comments/observations regarding this post, I'm working off memory and have not looked up old manuals.

Wayne Penrith.

when I was still young, many, many years ago, Astor had at least one live chassis B&W TV.

I was self taught teenager in big Bris TV repair Co. shop - Only remember hot chassis Pope.

Interesting that hot chassis were the rule in UK before even the advent of television in Aust.
England is surprisingly laissez faire with things like this such as liberal gambling laws (slot machine
in hotel lounge in Fawlty Towers) (parking in any direction on streets)(both illegal in Aust & USA)

But strict in Victoria: Surprised by full wave rectifier law - does this isolate mains better? as neutral was already to chassis thanks to polarized AC plug format.

...parking in any direction on streets

This probably comes from the fact that most side streets in London are barely two cars wide and here in Sydney it is much the same in the inner suburbs. Whilst it is illegal to park on the wrong side of the road doing-so tends to get let go in many narrower streets as the police are pre-occupied with other matters. Another illegal habit is parking half the car on the footpath and this also gets left alone in narrow streets. A copper was going to book me for doing it once on Great North Road, Abbotsford - his bonnet facing mine as I walked out of a newsagency carrying a paper and a carton of chocolate milk. Being a young bloke at the time and only in possession of 'silent Ps', a licence granted to naughty boys who had lost all their demerit points, I managed to talk the copper out of booking me but yeah, I was lucky. Great North Road, which ends at the old AWA Radio Electric Works site at Ashfield, was wide because it once had a tram reservation on it and thus I had no excuse for being so lazy by not turning the car around.

That said, it is quite noticeable that the Poms do this. When I watch The Bill everyone does it. The residents, the villains, the coppers and even the milko in his electric cart.

As for poker machines (slot machine in the US, fruit machine in the UK) we are on a 'winner' there. Australia has a tad under 200,000 of them and half of that number are in NSW. About 40,000 of the machines in Australia are owned by Woolworths through their ownership of more than 300 pubs. None are located in the foyer of a B&B though we sometimes make up for that with the odd game of two-up.

Page 20 and 21 of this document will give a state by state run down on who has what.

this document

An interesting resource, it's a good thing they count the Pachinko parlours as gambling, (being run by the Japanese mob) good chance you can cash out your ball bearings

That's why pinballs with "free games" counters were banned in many places - and the more blatant Bingo machines with their triple digit credit counters.

I have been studying television theory and servicing by reading the television servicing series ( volumes 1-4 ) by G.N Patchett , head of department of electrical engineering Bradford institute of technology. The series I have was written in 1960, around the time of manufacture of my HMV F5.

They are excellent texts, developing circuits from first principles with good explanation , however bits of it are difficult to relate to the Australian television I have, most notably the power supply chapter where mains transformers were not used in the UK. However, I'm glad mine does have one!

Further to the use of full-wave rectification in Live Chassis televisions.

I was told when I was an apprentice "Radio Mechanic," as it was then called, that it was the
Supply Authorities that were against the use of half-wave rectification, as it caused asymetrical loading of the mains supply, saturating the core of the pole mounted transformers and causing them to overheat.

Also there was also the problem of metal from pipes in the ground being eroded by the direct current flowing through the ground.

If anyone has seen car ignition points, they would have seen metal taken from one side of the points causing a pit, and a mound on the other contact where the metal was deposited.

Perhaps someone with some time to research this, could use these notes as a starting point to inform us of this largely unknown subject.

Wayne.

As for poker machines (slot machine in the US, fruit machine in the UK) we are on a 'winner' there. Australia has a tad under 200,000 of them and half of that number are in NSW

Below might explain why they are called Poker Machines in Aus:
Who remembers this?:
Article in Electronics Australia: (early 1960s?)
"ITT helps Poker Machine maker achieve true Poker payouts".
I think the gist of the article was ITT (Aust) designed a TTL card (with maybe a look-up table of all poker-hand combinations) to assess payouts from mechanical 5-reel machine.
A world first? Similar to modern video poker games!

Anyone have an archive to look-up article?

I used to have two of the old mechanical machines - taken off council cleanup piles. To my amazement both machines were quite old but still in prime mechanical condition. They were labelled poker machines on the compliance plates on the sides of the machines though the smaller one had the fruit symbols across three reels and the larger one had cards across five reels. I've seen other types in antique shops with fruit across four reels.

Both my machines were the proper 10c jobs with the arm that is pulled to wind up the spring and get the reels spinning. They worked without electricity though they did have a male socket at the back (like the ones installed on caravans) to accept an extension lead to light up the front panel.

Modern electronic machines lack the character of the older ones though they are programmable to pay a certain number of wins in accordance with gaming legislation and those that are cashless can also lock out those who declare themselves problem gamblers - those who have fed in the rent money in the past, often on numerous occasions.

I can't see any reference to anything made by ITT here, probably because they traded under the STC banner until they got swallowed by Alcatel in the late 80s. Even then, Alcatel was still stamping the STC brand on telephones they made for Telecom for several years after the takeover.