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The last thing I am going to say on this subject is this. If you want to know the truth about Wal-mart and how they have cost the jobs of thousands of Americans I mean the jobs that pay paid a living wage not the the seven dollar and fifty cent an hour jobs that they create. Please read these books. "Take this Job and Ship it." By Senator Byron Dorgan. When I read this book it made me so mad I had a headache for a week. In it tells how Wal-Mart being the largest retailer in the World forces it's suppliers to charge less and less for there goods. Forcing once American made product companies to have no other choice but to close up shop here in the USA throwing people out of work and moving production to China. I still have not seen the benefit of any major savings on anything. One example and there are millions of examples. Is I bought a Hoover vacuum 3 years ago. It was made in Canton Ohio. I paid $100.00 dollars for it at Target. Since then the Hoover vacuum cleaner factory in Canton has closed the workers were making 20 dollars an hour and is now building them in China and Mexico. The same vacuum today made in China is still 100 dollars. The reason Hoover moved production to China and Mexico was that Wal-Mart wanted them to continue selling the vacuums at their stores but could not sell them to Wal-Mart at the lower price they wanted to pay for each vacuum. Hoover said No to Wal-mart. Well seeing that Wal-mart is the largest retailer/seller of Hoover vaccums Hoovers sales fell off so bad they had no choice to throw everone out of work and go to China/Mexico. This is just one Example. There is Radio Flier wagons, Etch-a-sketch and a billion more this has happend too. It also why wages have gone backwards not forwards in this country. Please read this book it is not just on Wal-Mart it is on how the Middle Class in this country is disapearing at an alarming rate and how corperate America runs the government. The other book is by Lou Dobbs called "War on the Middle Class". It is just as good. There was a Time when I shopped at Wal-Mart it is when Sam Walton was still alive and prided himself on having American made goods in his stores. When he died that all changed. I don't want to change peoples minds. I just want people to look at the big picture and make up their own minds.

So anyways now onto TV's. In the next couple of weeks I will be taking my CTC-5 "Wescott" into a TV repair guy that said he would work on it. All of my freinds can't wait to see it working again. I just hope it doesn't cost a fortune to get it working again. Sorry for the rant.

Not too long ago I read a story about the demise of Cannon towls that echos what Andy and bigolds98 said about Wal Mart.

I have also read that 90+% of Costco and Target's employees have employer supplied health insurance, but less than 60% of Wal-Marts employees do. (Wal-Mart would rather us tax payers supply it through Medicaid, etc.) For the reasons mentioned above and by several other posters, I try to avoid shopping there.

Argh! I know exactly which player you're referring to. They were sold here with Sony and/or other labels on them (literally, I found one that was marked Sony on the front, but with some other house brand on the back). Both the S-video jack and the fuse holder on the back panel were purely cosmetic. Not only were they not connected, they didn't even have any metal contacts in them. The power supply was not fused. I wonder if any of them ever caught fire.

At least even the cheapest, nastiest, crappiest DVD players I've seen have an actual fuse on the primary side of the power supply.

Primary fuses
 

I have found that some transformers in cheap electronics do have a primary fuse, it is located in the transformer under the cardboard covering the primary side. It is connected between the input wire and the begining of the windings. Sometimes if you are carefull you can cut the cardboard vertically with an Exacto blade and peel back the layers to get to the fuse. It can be a pain, but if you have a transformer with multi-tap secondarys that is impossible to find and it presents with the primary open, it's worth the look. All you have to lose is some time. Crown Power Amps do it right, they have the normal fuse holder on the rear panel, plus there is another one inside the amp, rated at 1 amp higher so when the road tech wraps a fuse with foil and makes it a zillion amp no-blow fuse, the amp has an internal backup.
Richard.

Every time I read a newspaper article marveling about the "amazing chinese economic growth" I feel extremely disgusted. It's easy to grow like that, exporting extremely cheap ( because they were built with slave/or extremelly underpaid labor ) no-quality and even fake products to the rest of the world, whose governants are on the payroll of the "Secret Government" that is really running this planet, a Secret Government who wants the flood of chinese goods all around the world...for what purpose, I still don't know, but clearly is not for the good of the citizens of this planet. It's not even good for the people of China, because the economic boom there is a result of exporting, not a result of creating a strong internal market. I've read that only 20% of the chinese population have a good standard of living, the other 80% are still living like in the sinister times of Mao Tse Tung.

My wife bought an MP3 player a few weeks ago. As I was distracted, looking at the other merchandise in the store, I didn't help her ( who has little knowledge of electronics ) on her buying. Big mistake. That blasted thing was "Made in China" , and, as you can imagine, it was a piece of crap. Never worked right. We tried to send it to an authorized technician, only to find out that no one was repairing these things anymore. The only authorized tech that could do it, had just quit working with that brand. Luckily, the store agreed to exchange that MP3 for other products, and we were able to made a very good deal, giving them that awful chinese piece of junk, and taking home in exchange some nice dishes for the kitchen, some nice big glasses to drink soda and a few titles on DVD, including Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. However, the store was not completely honest, as they put that MP3 for sale again, hoping to deceive some other poor fool...

I believe that people should vote for politicians who are in favor of protectionism. All this "international free trade" system seems to be doing more harm than good. In America, it's destroying the middle class; here in Brazil, which have always been a country with big social problems, it's destroying the few pockets of prosperity that used to exist here. We had the biggest toy factory of Latin America, "Brinquedos Estrela" ( "Star Toys" ) founded in 1937 by Jewish immigrants. For decades, they produced quality and high-quality toys at affordable prices, and paid decent wages to their workers. Then, in 1990, the new government decided that Brazil should embark on all this globalization-free-trade nonsense, and opened all the gates to widespread, uncontrolled, low taxation imports, and that factory was literally crushed. They survived, but are no longer the giant they used to be. Most of the toys they sell today under their brand are in fact chinese made toys rebadged with the old "Estrela" logo. They became more an importer than a real factory. Other smaller toy companies were not so lucky and closed for good. Today, you see a lot of cheap low quality chinese made toys in the hands of our children, and when I mean cheap I really mean cheap, they can be bought for almost nothing. In a country that desperately needs the creation of jobs, such policies should be considered treason. On a final note, that Jewish family is no longer the owner of the factory. They sold it years ago, after the devastation made in their business by the chinese imports. A friend of mine, who, like myself, is a TV collector, entered their mansion a short time ago, because they were making a huge garage sale. Everything in that huge house ( according to him it resembled Scarlet O'Hara mansion from the movie "Gone With the Wind" ) was for sale. He was able to score a 1954 Dumont TV set, that they bought new in a trip to the USA in 1954. It probably is the only Dumont television set in Brazil, because unlike other companies like GE or Admiral, Dumont never had a factory or import representative in Brazil.

I just got back from the local Sears store, I looked at the Craftsman lawn equipment and all were made in China. The Diehard battery chargers were from Mexico. The Craftsman generators were from China, so much for the Craftsman name. The only item I could find made in the USA was the Diehard automotive battery, the smaller ones for lawn tractors and such were from Mexico

The cheap, inferior products branded with once-reputable names are just the tip of the iceberg. American industry has been systematically dismantled by Corporate oligarchs who are working toward enslaving all of America under the rule of a scandalously wealthy elite, which (despite its false "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability" motto) is the true nature of Communism.

Kruschev's "We will bury you!" threat from the 1950s was only a part of a longer series of threats which have since shown themselves to be almost prophetic. Kruschev knew that he had planted an army of Communists here who would slowly indoctrinate Americans to embrace Communism without ever realizing they were doing so, and the indoctrination would be accomplished through the schools, media, and churches which he had instructed his brainwashing experts to infiltrate and use to preach Communism disguised as expansion of freedom. What he actually said was "We will bury you! Your children are being spoon fed Socialism, and one day your grandchildren will live under Communism!"

One of the "planks" which Moses M. Levy (better known by his pen name, Karl Marx) stated must be at the foundation of Communism was the elimination of the middle class. NAFTA, GATT, and many other programs enacted by our corrupt giovernment, along with the "amnesty" and "guest worker" proposals which will flood the country with a new peasant underclass whose gang affiliations, savage violence, and flagrant disregard of the rule of law will ultimately turn their "peaceful demonstrations for amnesty" into Bolshevik Revolution USA whether granted amnesty or not.

Trashing the names of once-great American manufacturers by those names' being asociated with inferior, disposable products is a bit of "adding insult to injury" as our nation is being softened up for its destruction.

Proving the greatness of America's former industries by showing that American products at 50 and 60 years old can still be restored to working order with a little effort is one of my motivations for restoring vintage electronics.

Communism
 

One of the idols of the communists is an Italian named Antonio Gramsci, who always said that the way to turn a society into a communist regime was not by means of violent revolution, but by slow cultural indoctrination. I observed that all around the world there's a lot of people who are following this guy's agenda.