On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 16:12:24 -0500, "Jimmie D"
wrote:

Oh, you reveal you age.

Hi Jimmie,

I did my apprentice work in TV as a teen in the mid 60s. The real
challenge came when I was in the Navy (1970) and we put out a call to
the Bay area for folks to donate their TVs for charity (Xmas of 1970),
and the ET school would fix them for free for redistribution to the
needy.

My crew took in 100-150 TVs and 200 radios and turned out 60 or 70 TVs
and nearly all the radios. Some TVs were so old as to have vertically
mounted tubes with a mirror to view them. I taught the fellows how to
cannibalize the truly dead to resurrect the lame. This was the gift
of a Navy technical education. At sea, there was no mall to pull
into and go to Radio Shack - you had to make the broken stuff work or
the Captain would keel haul you. This demanded every tech know
electronics, not board swapping. I never had such an enthusiastic
class. These guys learned like sponges, and tackled every problem
like a commando gutting a commie.

One interesting incident came when a student asked me for a set of
rabbit ears to test his work on a tough-dog TV. My budget was like
$20 a week from the Old Man's wallet (and I wasn't going to ask him
for that). I told the student that we had a ground bus-bar that ran
the length around the repair shed (a former laundry) that would work
just as well as it was many wavelengths longs so as to not short the
signal (sitting in the middle of SF bay offered huge amounts of
available RF).

He connected an alligator clip lead to the antenna input, the other to
the bus bar; the lead turned to smoke, the insulation dripped right
off like a length of spaghetti, and then fused open.

The astonished crew quickly learned the hazards of poorly engineered
grounds in commercial equipment, the hazards of using a service cord
to defeat an interlock, and why we in the trade called it a suicide
adapter.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC