A good reason to never "just plug it in"

[Kamakiri]

Ah, the fun you can have at a friend's expense. He nearly crapped his pants when he saw this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRasv...ature=youtu.be

[Jon A.]

Oh man, that's gold. Gotta love it.

[Tony V]

Hey Tim...Bill C. would have a stroke wouldn't he? LOL!

[Kamakiri]

This one belongs to BigAudioAl, but believe me.....I plan to show this to Bill tomorrow though

[JBL GUY]

That is great.

Thanks for the link.

[Electronic M]

This just goes to show some of the worst post power up set failures are caused by the technician. :p

Seriously though most major smoke outs I've experienced were my own doing... I made the mistake of wiring the replacement doubler diodes backwards in my old Split chassis Philco which caused the good original caps to overheat, and then I replaced the 100 something uF doubler caps with a bunch of 22uF caps in parallel. I had it on a variac and had it almost up to voltage when I went to the dining room for diner...Some time later I started hearing regularish faint popping sounds from my room I ran back from the diner table and discovered that those 22uF caps were exploding one by one. About halfway between then and now I smoked B+ power resistors in two different rectangular Color sets from shorts. The first was my Zenith Chromacolor which during a focus repair (during reassembly after doing a cateract removal) I dripped solder on one of the above chassis terminals. I found that the original resistor smoked out so I just replaced it rather than trying to determine the cause...The replacement was an aluminum heat-sink cased dale power resistor. That thing went with a BANG! the moment I powered the set on. The other set was a single section of restuffed lytic that I wired backwards amazingly I was able to replace the resistor and reform the cap on my heathkit C-3 so one new resistor and cap wiring re-reversal later all was well.
The only hardcore old age cap failures I can recall were in my 9-T-246 I gave it a test power up and since there was no raster I feed a signal into the phono input and listened for a few minutes until smoke started creeping out and wax started dripping from a horizontal stage cap that let go. Later in that set's restoration I had replaced most of the caps except for two of the lytic cans....Then shortly after power up one of the cans started to hiss or whistle as the electrolyte boiled out the bottom.

[Jon A.]

I was in a hurry once hooking up one of my 8-track car stereos on the bench after a cleaning and lubing and hooked up the power in reverse. I was using 18-gauge blue/clear speaker wire for power, making the polarity less obvious. That smoked some transistors and popped at least one cap.

[bigaudioal]

I literally jumped up off the sofa from a horizontal position and yelled, "WHAT IS HE DOING?!?!?!?!" Scared the hell out of my wife.

Good one! You got me.

[Jon A.]

If that was the selenium rectifiers going up, it would be more his problem than yours.

[Celt]

Tim, you are a baaaaaaaaaadd man!

[CaryLee]

You got me on that one...that set looks REALLY close to the one I'm starting to restore..and I was quietly hollering "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" until....well.....you know!!!!


....hardy har har!

[TVTim]

That was a very well done video. Carry on.

[soundman2]

Oh, very good! LOL!

[kramden66]

oh that's a riot alice , a real riot

[DavGoodlin]

Imagine a nice loud fffffffffffffffffffffffftt - pop, with dielectric confetti raining down.