Who's got the funniest TV tech picture?

[Tom_Ryan]

...i think we get the picture. We could start another thread. "Our most memorable shocks". When I was just a wee lad I tried and was eventually successful at building a Tesla spark coil. Say I wish I had a camera 40 years ago to share my escapade...Here's how is went:

Got the tesla coil assembled then I plugged in the xfmr to power it up but it only hummed with a ...strange sizzling sound inside the metal box. When you get older you realise that some things are probably just left alone...but to a 14 year old...that's a different story. Ok, time to tear the old xfmr apart and fix the problem. I meticulouly spent hours and hours removing tar from the xfmr case until I had completely exposed the xfmr core and windings. I repaired the connection and plugged in the primary.

I quickly found out why the xfmr needed to be immersed in tar...it's kinda like the insulating donnut on a flyback transformer ...it keeps the outer HV from arcing to ground. Well, .... the xfmr lite up in a ball of fire. It was quite a scene. Definitely out of the twlight zone. I had erected the thing on top of the family pool table thinking it had a nice large padded surface. My next problem was how do you extinguish a burning neon sign xfmr on top of a pool table? ...and then within a second or two a mains fuse blew, and the room lights went out...except, of course the light from that nice burning glow. Oh, did I forgot to mention the smell of buring tar?

Live and learn. I threw a bath towel over the burning mess and it extinguished itself; after which I dumped the old xfmr in the garbage. Finally, I got a good xfmr and the memory of Tesla produced a wonder 4 foot long corona discharge from the project. I probably nuked myself many times with that thing...still had kids though...guess it wasn't that bad.

[markthefixer]

Back in the "dumbest thing you ever did" thread I posted this
about a zapping...

But in keeping with the original spirit of the thread, I looked for a little cartoon I saw put up as a "please stand by" test pattern when technical difficulties interrupted tv programming (on WGN??) years ago, it showed a guy prying into the top of an old (big) tv camera with a series of parts arcing ballistically in the air away from the camera, caps, resistors, tubes and whatnot.

I always got a chuckle out of seeing it...

But I never found it.....

[wa2ise]

Back in around 1971 I and a friend was trying to repair an RCA CTC19 set. After replacing a width or some such coil in the horizontal, we got it going except for no color. ANyway, while poling around I noticed that the horizontal output tube plate cap looked to be falling off, and reached to push it back down. You can guess what the result of that was.

SOmewhere in the IF I found a transformer with about 70 volts across its primary. Which might explain the loss of color, but for some reason we didn't follow up on this. Eventually the chassis got thrown out, but the cabinet is still around. Anyone need a floor console cabinet for a CTC19?