What made vintage old tv dangerous to turn on

[Acabal1234]

My Name is art. im new to the site. what made old tv dangerous to turn on. As a kid i remember the tvs were always smelling like burnt and smoke billowing from the top. that was nerv wreking as a kid to see lol.

if one restores a vintage tv is there a new way of upgrading the electronics so that they dont depend on bulbs or some of the paper transistors?

[Electronic M]

I feel like I'm writing a response to sanjaraili, but here goes.

Really any electronic device new or old can smoke if enough is wrong with it. There have been many instances of people on here getting say a 50 year old Zenith from an estate sale and discovering it still works and all its capacitors and tubes are original.
Electrolytic capacitors go bad with age. Electrolytic capacitors in new gear suck just as bad as 50 year old ones. Around 2002 they hit an all time low in quality,...google "capacitor plague" to read about it. In the late 50s to early 60s paper capacitors were abandoned by manufacturers which improved reliably greatly.

Actual reliability and problems depended on the manufacturer and the year. Some designs were good enough to hold up for decades without maintenance, others wouldn't work well from new. Tubes rarely cause smoke, but paper caps and lytics can.

Monochrome TVs averaged more reliable than color. They were 1.5-3x less complex so there was less to go wrong in a monochrome set.

The easiest thing to do if you don't want to mess with old electronics is find a modern piece of furniture to install your flat screen TV in that makes it look vintage. There are retro TV console flatscreen cabinets made today if you search.

Most people on these forums are engineering and or tinkering types and we prefer to take an original TV replace just the lytic and paper capacitors (and a few other parts on an as needed basis) and make a vintage set work with it's original tube circuits. There's a lot of challenge and fun in that for those who like technical puzzles. Reading this forum and the antique radio forums TV section and books on TV repair from the time period are ways to learn how to repair... Starting with repairing tube radios is also good.

If you are familiar with the movie The Matrix the last 2 paragraphs are basically a red pill /blue pill on wanting a working vintage TV.

[MadMan]

The danger is part of the experience. The giant high voltage glass grenade in front of me as I type this is part of the fun.

And vacuum tubes have their own intrigue. Removing them from a TV would gut it of the very thing that makes it interesting in the first place. 20 little glass bulbs filled with nothing and glowing hot delicate pieces of metal somehow control and amplify an invisible force, how is that not cool?

So the thing might stink of ozone, use far too much electricity, make a high pitched whine that only young people and dogs can hear, and might implode and kill somebody some day. But it works. In spite of all that, it makes something magical happen.

~~~

But yeah, paper capacitors are garbage. Fortunately, that technology has advanced very far, and there's really no reason not to replace the wax paper bombs.

[electronjohn]

A truly enjoyable aroma is old dust on hot tubes

[Acabal1234]

thank you guys for the feedback!

[oldtvman]

Originally Posted by Acabal1234

My Name is art. im new to the site. what made old tv dangerous to turn on. As a kid i remember the tvs were always smelling like burnt and smoke billowing from the top. that was nerv wreking as a kid to see lol.

if one restores a vintage tv is there a new way of upgrading the electronics so that they dont depend on bulbs or some of the paper transistors?

bad programs.