Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamakiri
"Let the man who hath never blown anything up cast the first stone" 2 Farnsworth 4, verse 12
Know how I restore a TV or radio? I test and replace parts that in the grand scheme of things I feel that it makes sense to replace given a certain condition. If you equated my amount of electronic knowledge to a car, it would be like saying that I can acknowledge when I suspect a car has a bad fuel pump. I can test a fuel pump. I can replace a fuel pump. But, I don't know how a fuel pump makes the car run. Exchange "fuel pump" with "2nd IF stage", or something, and there's me.
I don't know Ohm's law. I blew up my first radio at age 8, but I repaired my first radio at age 8 1/2. I also built my first TV by trash picking different sets and swapping parts until I got something that kinda worked. Think I was 11. Everything else, well, it came to me along the way.
This is, after all, a hobby. I think that anyone who tried to make a living off of restoring TVs would go broke rather quickly.
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I understand what you're saying, but the concept is foreign to me.
I made a very good living as a service tech for 20+ years before moving into engineering. I began tinkering around the same age you did, and of course, I destroyed equipment in the process of my experiments. But, as time progressed, so did I, and I became a professional in the field. As I honed my skills and knowledge base (I attended electronics school), destruction of equipment became increasingly rare and my success rate was very close to 100%.
The equipment that I experimented on and destroyed in the process was often fairly common, and in some cases in daily use (like roundie color sets,) so it was quite plentiful.
It is the same equipment that I read of folks working on now. However, it is rarer and not so easily repaired or replaced if inexperienced, untrained hands begin chopping away at it. And every time a set ends up on the unrepairable pile because someone that didn't really know what they were doing got to it, to me, is very sad. It's also a part of history that doesn't exist any more.
Maybe that will help you understand how I feel about this "hobby" sometimes.