I'm reaching the age where people don't believe that the things I vaguely remember from my childhood ever existed.
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@jztusk
There was one at the hardware store when I was a kid. Nobody used it anymore but I loved playing around with it and looking at the old tubes. -
I'm reaching the age where people don't believe that the things I vaguely remember from my childhood ever existed.
Please reply if you have ever seen one of these in real life:
@jztusk i would have been very tempted to stick my fingers in there
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I'm reaching the age where people don't believe that the things I vaguely remember from my childhood ever existed.
Please reply if you have ever seen one of these in real life:
@jztusk 10,000% (though to be fair, I never understood what they were for…)
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@jztusk
There was one at the hardware store when I was a kid. Nobody used it anymore but I loved playing around with it and looking at the old tubes.There was one in the grocery store where I'd go with my mom to do the weekly shopping! I don't think I ever saw anyone use it, but it wasn't abandoned enough that they'd let some kid just play around with it.
(I mentioned this yesterday to a friend who was also born in the 1960s, and he gave me such a "what the heck are you talking about?" look that I thought I'd check to see if anyone else remembered them. Thank you for making me feel less delusional.
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I'm reaching the age where people don't believe that the things I vaguely remember from my childhood ever existed.
Please reply if you have ever seen one of these in real life:
@jztusk saw one of those as a kid, and my dad used it to test some tube when our tv had some problems, so I've seen it in use too.
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I think it just used low voltage/current to detect complete breaks.
Thinking back, I feel like I've been told that CRT displays had a huge capacitor in them, and the idea of your average TV owner opening one up sounds awfully dangerous.
Oh well, generation "riding the the back seat of the car without seatbelts while the parents smoked away in the front seat", I guess.
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I'm reaching the age where people don't believe that the things I vaguely remember from my childhood ever existed.
Please reply if you have ever seen one of these in real life:
Not only saw them. Used them to fix the radio and TV. If the TV didn't work. "It was probably a tube." And dad would open the back of the set and unplug all 5 or 6 tubes. We'd carry them to the hardware store in a paper bag and use the tube tester to figure out which one was blown. Buy the replacement. Head back home full of hope, and replace all the tubes plus the shiney new tube. Invariably it worked and the TV fired right up. Howdy Doody!
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Not only saw them. Used them to fix the radio and TV. If the TV didn't work. "It was probably a tube." And dad would open the back of the set and unplug all 5 or 6 tubes. We'd carry them to the hardware store in a paper bag and use the tube tester to figure out which one was blown. Buy the replacement. Head back home full of hope, and replace all the tubes plus the shiney new tube. Invariably it worked and the TV fired right up. Howdy Doody!
An actual user! Or at least the son of an actual user.
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Not only saw them. Used them to fix the radio and TV. If the TV didn't work. "It was probably a tube." And dad would open the back of the set and unplug all 5 or 6 tubes. We'd carry them to the hardware store in a paper bag and use the tube tester to figure out which one was blown. Buy the replacement. Head back home full of hope, and replace all the tubes plus the shiney new tube. Invariably it worked and the TV fired right up. Howdy Doody!
Dang, we never had a TV console made out of wood!
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An actual user! Or at least the son of an actual user.
Actually the first thing to do was to pull all the tubes and plug them back in. The most likely thing was a loose or intermittent connection on one of the pins. If that didn't work it was off to the hardware store tube tester.
That's also why people would hit their sets to jiggle the connections.
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Actually the first thing to do was to pull all the tubes and plug them back in. The most likely thing was a loose or intermittent connection on one of the pins. If that didn't work it was off to the hardware store tube tester.
That's also why people would hit their sets to jiggle the connections.
aka "kinetic repair"
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An actual user! Or at least the son of an actual user.
@jztusk @mastodonmigration IIRC, my Dad used to pick up discarded TVs and change the vacuum tubes to make them work again. (Obviously only those discarded TVs with no other obvious disrepair.)
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Actually the first thing to do was to pull all the tubes and plug them back in. The most likely thing was a loose or intermittent connection on one of the pins. If that didn't work it was off to the hardware store tube tester.
That's also why people would hit their sets to jiggle the connections.
Another fun old electronics story from the 1970s. Had a Kenwood 6006 amplifier. It stopped working, so took it to the stereo repair place. The guy determined it was a capacitor which he replaced. It worked for a week and failed again, so took it back. Guy said probably a bad lot of capacitors and replaced all 20 of the same ones. The amp is still working today.
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If your reaction is "WTF????", you can check here :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_tester (the section titled "Self Service"), or look at these beauties: https://vintagestoredisplay.info/2018/01/vintage-sylvania-electronic-tube-tester-self-service-lighted-store-display/
@jztusk lol I'm in my mid 40's and I have one of these under my workbench. I used it before to determine I needed to replace a high-mileage triode in an all-American-six radio I was restoring.
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Another fun old electronics story from the 1970s. Had a Kenwood 6006 amplifier. It stopped working, so took it to the stereo repair place. The guy determined it was a capacitor which he replaced. It worked for a week and failed again, so took it back. Guy said probably a bad lot of capacitors and replaced all 20 of the same ones. The amp is still working today.
I remember when people used to get the drive chain on their cars replaced at like 120k miles no matter what, because that's about how long they'd last and having them fail on the road was really bad.
I am slowly learning that capacitors are the timing chain of electronics: after X years, if you've got the device open just automatically replace them - the odds of them failing are pretty high.
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@jztusk lol I'm in my mid 40's and I have one of these under my workbench. I used it before to determine I needed to replace a high-mileage triode in an all-American-six radio I was restoring.
You're the reason I put all the "retro" hashtags on my post.
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I'm reaching the age where people don't believe that the things I vaguely remember from my childhood ever existed.
Please reply if you have ever seen one of these in real life:
@jztusk I have seen *and used* one of those.
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You're the reason I put all the "retro" hashtags on my post.
@jztusk in my defense I've been obsessed with radio and electronics and their history since before the whole "retro" thing came into vogue. It has to do with growing up surrounded by broadcast engineers and their collections of strange and wondrous magical boxes that plucked signals out of the air with glass bottles that glowed.
Radio is magic and you cannot prove otherwise.
Someone I follow boosted your post and I saw both the challenge and the picture of that RCA tube tester, and couldn't resist chiming in.
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@jztusk in my defense I've been obsessed with radio and electronics and their history since before the whole "retro" thing came into vogue. It has to do with growing up surrounded by broadcast engineers and their collections of strange and wondrous magical boxes that plucked signals out of the air with glass bottles that glowed.
Radio is magic and you cannot prove otherwise.
Someone I follow boosted your post and I saw both the challenge and the picture of that RCA tube tester, and couldn't resist chiming in.
You're taking to someone who has a still growing collection of slide rules.
Also, to address your last paragraph, this has unintentionally turned into me trawling for new accounts to follow. Glad you took the bait.
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You're taking to someone who has a still growing collection of slide rules.
Also, to address your last paragraph, this has unintentionally turned into me trawling for new accounts to follow. Glad you took the bait.
@jztusk nerds unite!!!
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