Every month or so, I do a round of the antique shops that still exist in Sydney and came across this one today at Lunatiques, located on the corner of Gardeners Road and Kent Road at Mascot.

It is a Reliance and has a couple of strange quirks. The first being the channel dial, arranged with the channels in the following order - 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 2, 7, 9, 10, 11. The labelling is partially damaged so I could not find channels 0 and 5A though they may have been present but simply not seen by my crook eyes. I don't know when this set was built so it may be an early 10-channel set or a later 13-channel one. I am suspecting that it was a later set as there would have been no way of knowing in 1956 that 2, 7, 9 and 10 would be reserved for capital city allocations as only 7 and 9 were available at the time.

The other strange feature is the inclusion of both vertical and horizontal hold controls on the front panel and in a more prominent position than the power/volume knob which was located at the bottom of the control panel. Surely this control should have been right under the channel selector so people didn't have to bend right over just to turn the set on or adjust the volume. The set designers missed the bus with that one.

This would no doubt be a rare set.

Happy New Year.

The early television tuners did not come with a full set of coils (biscuits). Therefore the existing capital city stations were physically grouped together.

This worked out well for Sydney having .ch 10 next to 9.

In Melbourne,when ch 0 came along, we would fit Ch 0 coil kits, to sets that had an incremental tuner. Basically, A.W.A's.

Melbourne surrendered the ch 0 frequency to the S.B.S. (Special Broadcasting Services) in 1980 and moved the "O network" to ch 10. Later, the frequency of ch 10 was shifted up by one Megahertz.. Was never called to re-tune a television.

Can't find any information on Reliance TV.
What was the price? And did it follow you home?

Wayne.

G'day Wayne,

Nah, I didn't buy it. This post was more to let any interested parties know that its available. I neglected to check the price to be honest and feel a bit ashamed that I came home without noting it. I was consumed by the fact that the brand is Reliance, which I thought faded away before television came along. It may be badge-engineered but maybe not.

Until today I'd never seen the channels arranged that way on the dial. I've only ever seen 10 or 13 channel sets numbered 1-10 with a star/asterisk on the 11th spot or 0-11 with 5A jammed in the middle. Going by the shape of the screen it looks like an earlier model with a 21 inch tube but my knowledge of early tellies isn't as acute as it is for radios.

Mitchell Road Antique Centre is just around the corner and I might be popping in there for a look-see next Saturday. If so, I'll go back to Lunatiques and grab the price of the Reliance. It should be noted that both these shops regularly deal in tellies.

That TV would probably be an AW Jackson Industries set. They did a lot of house brands and also sold their own TVs branded "Precedent".

IEKCO also made TVs for that brand. The giveaway that makes yours an AW Jackson is the rounded cabinet Quite distinctive.
Tuner is by Astor.

They were cheap but were a well designed, simple TV that is capable of excellent results.

I know through my limited knowledge of Reliance is that they did build their own TVs towards their end, maybe this one was a last ditch effort or one they sold in their shop with the Reliance brand when they converted their business model to something similar to Retravision . I am lucky enough to have a old friend that lives around the corner from me that used to be their service technician. He told me many times about the conversations he had with the Father and Son that owned Reliance.
I'm thinking like Ian that this is made by another factory but I know the definitely did build their own design of set.

Definitely a Precedent. AW Jackson Industries, Annandale. 1958 or 1959 vintage.