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I will add that when I started collecting radios/tv sets as a kid I always rushed home with my new find and quickly plugged it in to see if it worked. There was nobody back then to tell me any different, and I really didn't have an catastrophies out of it. Some sets didn't do much of anything, some worked quite well. I don't recall ever having one that had a dead short or something that caused dramatic results. Maybe the worst thing was on some radios that had black beauties-those things can go off like a shot, though it never hurt anything in my case, just scared me. (had one am/fm Zenith that would go off about once every 5 minutes! would keep playing, though) If a set didn't work back then it wasn't a whole lot of good to me as I had no repair ablities save for replacing tubes. I knew nothing about caps, and couldn't solder worth a darn anyway. Even later, when I figured out about recapping, I tended to do dumb things like install used caps out of 70s TV sets. The first old TV I ever had is a '54 RCA console that worked fine when I got it, and I put many hours on it through the 80s. The only defect was a stretched vertical (conehead syndrome!) which I couldn't adjust out. I eventually attempted a recap with a mix of new and used caps and when I was done the set didn't work at all. That has been almost 20 years ago, and I really need to redo that thing one of these days.
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Bryan
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