Quote:
Originally Posted by bgadow
I suspect it was mostly capacitors that killed sets back then, same as now, and folks didn't want to dump any money in them. That should mean that most "pulls" have plenty of life left in 'em. A few years ago I brought back to life a Motorola color set from which all the tubes had been pulled. I have been blessed with a very nice pile of tubes (could there be 10,000 of them?) and could have filled that TV with all NOS from my inventory. Instead I used all used tubes, just for the fun of it. Set works fine.
|
I have to strongly
agree with you on this one.
When I was young, I had found a few TV sets and many a radio with the infamous AC power hum when plugged in.
Whenever I showed such a set to a repairman, he would always saw "its a FILTER, that's not worth fixing" (never telling me that the "filter" was a $ 1.50 capacitor I could have replaced with my soldering iron).
A tube was available at many drug stores (in the day), and could be easily replaced by the user, but a capacitor could not.
I must also add, the resemblance of these life experiences is just uncanny. I remember trash-picking old electronics in 1979-80, fixing a set with one or two tubes, and soon filling the house with fully functional B&W console and portable sets!
As for B&W sets, my mom said "NO MORE!"
And for color sets, my success rate was far smaller. The last one was a 1968 Philco 25" color console, with a beautiful pix for a few seconds after power-up, followed by a sparking flyback. I laboriously replaced the flyback (which, to a teenager, was not cheap, either) and still had the same problem when I powered it up. This soured my taste for TV repair for a long time (in retrospect, I suspect that there was some HV anode short in the 25XP22 that was making the HV short).