Watch out for mice.....OMG!!!
 

Picked up this sad little 1953 Sylvania on Craigslist for $20. Kinda cute, right? :)

Well know what WASN'T CUTE?!?!?! THE FAMILY OF MICE STILL LIVING IN THE @#$% THING!!! :eek:

I bring it in the basement, check the picture tube, looks good, then I unbolt and slide out the chassis. Tip it over, and OMFG THERE ARE LIVE MICE INSIDE!!! A mom and 6 or 7 babies!!! I FREAKED!!! GAAAAHHHHH!!!!

Dropped the chassis PROMPTLY on the workbench, and thank God, none escaped.

Luckily, I have the most wonderful wife in the world, who helped me engineer a plan to get the chassis filled with mice, outside, and released. Not once mouse in the house, and the set is now halfway through a re-cap. Kinda HAD to, after that debacle.

In 30 years of dragging stuff like this home, this was a first. I will never again assume that mouse nests in sets aren't live ones :eek:

After having stage pianos and guitar amps brought to me for repair with dirt dobber nests, mice, etc.,
I now look at them outside before bringing them into the house. :nono:

Back in college, I bought a VW Squareback. Drove it home about 200 miles. Parked in the drive, looked down to see Mommy Mouse evacuating the babies from the footwell heater vent. Passenger side, fortunately. Ugh.

Chip

I had this happen with a Zenith 25LC30 roundie color that was stored in a garden shed, then brought to me for repairs. For some reason I opened it up outside and had to evict the same type of crew.

Back in the old days, when we were still part of AK, I remember somebody's tale of picking up a WW2 era console radio, loading it in their minivan, setting off, & nearly wrecking/getting stung to death when the 300+ angry Waspers came out to see why they were being moved...Meeces are gross & nasty, but usually not much more than an aggervation...Waspers/Hornets, OTOH...

Ah stop bein' babies ! We live wit hill billies here in upstate ny. All our neighbors are out in the yard trash burners, as a result all our cars have little micies livin in em. When I warm up the wife's car in the morning I see them jump out the back before she goes to work! ! ! and sometimes she looks over while driving and there's one of em lookin back at her from the floor..... forgot to get out that morning.....

...I remember as a boy watching when my dad would start the Grain Elevator up, the augur would spit out a BUNCH of rats & Meeces when it would first start. A lot of 'em were killed going thru the augur, & the ones that made it were easy pickin's for the assorted Barn Cats that always hung around...Kinda funny watchin' a Cat tryin' to catch a mouse, when her mouth already had 2 or 3 in it...Or watch 'em "Screw" w/the meeces...Catch one, let it go, & run for a few feet, then pounce again..Cats can be VICIOUS predators...

you know you can kill a mouse on the run with carb&choke cleaner ,he was dead before he came to a stop.

I thought I wanted one as a pet when I was in College...WRONG !! They take 2 steps, leave a Calling Card...Take 3 steps, leave a Tinkle..2 more steps, another calling card..My whole dorm room soon smelled "Mousy"... Mr Mouse soon got set outside another dorm..Went by a pet shop once, they must have had 250 of the little white buggers...Asked a gal who worked there, "Why so many Meeces ?!?" She kinda rolled her eyes & said they were for the Snake People... Said they'd all be gone in a week.. Never knew THAT many people had Snakes, but I guess they do..An' they call US WEIRD for likin' old TVs 'n' Radios...Mr Pot, meet Mr Kettle...(grin)

The family cabin has them on and off and I've never lived in a house where we didn't have mice or rats(for a few months) at some point. Current house has some that hang out in the walls near the kitchen and in the cabinets. Our cat never seems to catch them, but the traps are working. They are probably here because last year severe drought killed alot of the plants that squirrels, birds and mice survive winter on(big trees were dying too) and Mom was feeding the squirrels and birds on the back porch off the kitchen.

What drives me nuts are the wasps that decided they were going to claim the back porch last year. Those things are too damn teritorial. They made watering the yard(they liked the hose reel) and repainting the deck among other things a big pain.

Waspers & Hornets CANNOT be reasoned with...They can only be ELIMINATED..

Didn't work for me....I tried killing a nest of babies when I first got my '54 DeSoto I had.....found em under the back seat. They just kinda wriggled around in anguish :tears: . I just pulled the nest out, closed my eyes, and stomped on it really hard a few times.....:sigh:

did you have the little spary nozzel on that comes with can ,and also some choke cleaners are cheap ,like from autozone they wont even help start a engine ,napa had some pretty good stuff ,also walmart at one carryed one off brand that wasnt to bad.

I don't know what would be worse inside a set..mice or cockroaches!! Nothing comes in the house before a dust/dirt cleaning/removal inspection that's for sure.

I bet that doesn't happen again!

Cockroaches(with some possible spiecies exceptions) are worse. Mice you can easily trap before they multiply, but roaches tend to bread explosively and resist capture and poison.

Gumout, Berryman B12 and Berkebile 2+2 are the best. I had Mopars, so I went through alot of carb cleaner:sigh:
BTW Air rifles work great on mice, I find them in the firewood pile often.

Almost as bad as cutting up a basement wall stud and looking down at it, wondering what those wriggling white bugs are.. OHMYGAWD TERMITES!

Im always weary of bringing something home that's infested !
I try to buy stuff from clean places. If it looks dirty or smelly, I dont buy.

You really have to be careful when you find live Mice because that's where you can catch the Hantavirus. There apparently have only been two cases in New York State but I'd still be careful.

I've had some badly infested sets but they weren't active nests, years gone in fact but you could still smell the pee.
I still get out the Clorox and give them a bath no matter how long gone the Meeces are.

Back some years ago, I got a call about a color tube type TV that all of a sudden went dead. Opened it up and found a mouse had gotten fried on top of the HV trippler. which of course tripped the circuit breaker of the set. Removed the dead mouse, and coated the burnt terminals with some corona paint, reset the breaker and it was back in working order. Guess her TV made a pretty good, but expensive mouse trap!

What should I use on the inside of the cabinet?

I would about freak if I had mice in my house. All I get is the occasional blonde spider. Never in my life have I laid eyes on a cockroach either. The cold winters here in Buffalo kill all the little creepy crawlies :yes:

Hell, you folks in Florida, I hear that there's insects that you can ride....

These comments above are the reason that I never bring anything into the house until it's been thoroughly opened up and aired out.

I did have a problem with mice in my shop at one point. Customer brought in a console set right at closing time. It tested dead. I waited until the next day to check it out.

When I opened the door and turned on the lights in the morning, I saw 3 little shadows take off and run under the benches. There was a large nest inside the set, and a small hole under the chassis beside the metal screen.

I quickly rolled the console... it had wheels... out back, and opened it up further.

I got the nest out, but found it was full of babies. and a couple more big mice that ran away.

A little D-Con, and never saw any thing else. Customer refused the repair price, and I held the set for 90 days, and snatched the CRT and chassis for parts. The rest was smashed by a friend's little boy who loved destroying things, and tossed the carnage in the dumpster.

I'm running a set today that is using the CRT from this rat set.

I hate meeces to pieces! - snagglepuss

I had some of my stuff in a dry wood shed at my parents old house. Being in a heavily-wooded remote area, the meeces were relentless. Even squirrels got in and made a hellish mess, but at least they stayed out of the insides. Some meeces ate speaker cones, others ate grill cloth, leaving the cone alone (wtf) but all of those little bastards deuced and peed everywhere.

At least now, my dry but unheated garage has no evidence of meeces. It may be that Im in a sparsely wooded area surrounded by farms or because my gray tomcat lives in the garage and he masticates anything that enters!

Sorry, Dav.

Jinx hates meeces to pieces.

Snagglepuss, a total favorite of mine sez heavens to mergatroid. It's easy to mix them up.

I watched all of the Hanna Barbera product from Ruff and Reddy on, and later, their MGM cartoons. Great fodder for the TV kiddies... every morning on local TV!

I use a spray bottle with water and a little Bleach, little being the key word, I used a 50/50 mix the last time and it took a day before my sinuses recovered!
Probably a Tablespoon in a quart of water would be effective, I would still not breath it though.

I brought home a 1950's Grundig console several years ago... started pulling the chassis out the back and a couple dozen cock roaches came scurrying out! Talk about gross! Thanks goodness I was just in the garage with it.

Incidentally, the formerly mouse-infested set is almost ready for first power up. Have to do one more filter can. The mice only chewed on two wires to the volume control, luckily.

At this point, it's a pride thing. I can't let the little bastards win :D

Tim, does your Sylvania have the Halolight feature? Is the fly under the chassis?

I always open unknown radio' s and tv's outside, before bringing inside! Good thing too, as I once found the largest Wolf Spider I've ever seen in Michigan, crouched down and looking at me from the top of the chassis! Still gives me the "all-overs" when I think about it! I'm not crazy about meeces or snakes, but hate large spiders worse, they can send me squealing like a little school girl! :-) But my wife isn't afraid of spiders, she will walk right past a big one, then tell me "there's one of your friends!"

This particular set is the strippo, bare bones of the 1953 Sylvania line....

Y'know, WHY is it that I ALWAYS forget to search for the stupid flyback??? Geez. Just went and looked, it's mounted in a cage under the picture tube. Looks like there are some kinda screwy neon bulbs or something mounted in that box too. Hm. This is gonna be interesting.

I don't like spiders and snakes, and that ain't what it takes to love me...

I have a lot of spiders in my house... but they don't bother me. I look at it like this... they keep flies and mosquitos in check around here! I've seen people come here and just get the eebie-jeebies at the sight of a spider in the corner of a room.

If I wake in the night, turn on the light, and see one walking across the ceiling right above me... yeah well that kinda bothers me.

The only time I had a creepy episode with a spider... a couple of years ago I was doing some work in the crawl space under the house. Typically, if I am under there and the temperature is 50 or below, I don't worry about critters. This particular day, it warmed up into the 60's by lunch, and while under there, I saw something move out of the corner of my eye... and it REALLY was out of the corner of my eye... a damn spider had jumped from a floor joist onto my nose and then onto the ground!! Well, that was it for me!! A freakin spider jumps off my nose... time to get our from underneath the damn house!! :yikes:

Jinx-ey of course! Exit stage left...snagglepuss
Unfortunately this is a symptom of lots of late 60s early 70s TV watching, aging memory and then not finding Hanna Barbera stuff anywhere but YouTube now.

Heck - kids think Flintstones are either vitamins or the John Goodman movie.:sigh:

BTW, Critters getting worse in mid-atlantic as weather warms - Ants currently invading.

What the devil????
 

Neon bulbs in this set?!?!?!??!

They look like sub-miniature HV rectifiers to me. I think the Philco Safari uses them too. If they have more than two leads it is almost definite that those are the HV rect tubes.

Likely 5642 HV rectifiers... Older Tek scopes used them too!
Plenty of them on the 'Bay:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=5642+tube&_rdc=1
not affiliated,
jr

Interesting. Were using these babies cheaper than using one 1B3 tube?

I don't think so. At least in the 1971 Allied Industrial Catalogue the 5642 is $3.43 vs $2.37 for the 1B3/1G3. Their use made it possible to design very compact voltage doubler/tripler HV supplies, which were *possibly* more reliable than conventional supplies.

jr

How the heck do you test them?

Good question! Since it is unlikely that your tube checker (or any that I know of) has settings for the tube, I would just check the filament with an ohm meter... should be about 1.2-1.3 ohms (I just measured four of them). If you apply 1.25 V to the two filament pins, you should see the spiral filament (inside the plate area) glow. I don't think that I have ever seen a bad one in a vintage 'scope.

jr