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  #16  
Old 09-21-2011, 10:08 PM
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I would explore the earlier sets with the high-current high voltage circuit. DuMont was a famous user of this design, and that brand name has a sort of fifties sound to it, right? They were very high end sets in their day.

If the character you want to kill has a weak heart they would be more likely to be done in by a typical low-current high voltage supply.

I'm not sure about the implosion route. If your repairman is tied up, he wants to come up with a surefire way of killing this person. Being close to an imploding crt would likely injure someone but death would certainly be far from guaranteed.

So, he is tied up in that chair across the room and directs his captor as such: "that wire coming out of the little cage on the right, the fat red wire, don't tell me it is connected to the side of the picture tube? Oh, that is ALL wrong. Pull it out! Now, shove it in one of those holes on the side of the tuner. Got it? Good! Now, come on around and turn the set on...ZZZAPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!

An old story (probably dating from the fifties) and a very sad one, involved a young girl who was killed by a TV set. Seems that the repairman had lost one of the screws that held the chassis in place, so he just grabbed something he had on hand. The replacment was too long and touched a live wire up inside the chassis, thus putting a high voltage on the metal cabinet.

There is a group out there on the net (bet you would have to look hard) which believes that some sort of cold fusion style power source (or some such) is being hidden by the government and big corporations. The secret, some of them feel, is in a small news story from the mid-60s detailing how a young child was killed by an exploding GE color TV. There was quite an interesting thread about this on VK several years back. I don't know that you want to follow this angle as it is much more sci-fi than what you are after, but I thought I would mention it, if just to keep the legend alive!
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Last edited by bgadow; 09-21-2011 at 10:10 PM. Reason: syntax
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  #17  
Old 09-21-2011, 10:22 PM
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Sandy,
Great! I can use peeing on an electric fence in my story. I LOVE it! BTW, did you get a bad shock? Get knocked down? What happened? (Sorry to ask you to relive it.)
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  #18  
Old 09-21-2011, 10:34 PM
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Thanks, Bryan. Cool stuff. I do like the Dumont brand if only for the name! I'm not clever enough to handle sci-fi but I like the govt secret angle. Maybe the implosion wouldn't work. I'd rather see her electrocuted. But actually, I haven't even plotted out the story. I'm seeing what I have to work with before I do that. I'll probably be bugging you smart folks for the next year!
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  #19  
Old 10-04-2011, 08:48 PM
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hummm well you gunna have it a murder, or accidental death?? I guess this old goober is gunna have a character, maybe a few flaws, maybe he eats while he works on sets.... maybe he's got a weird kinda food he likes.... one that eats away at his finger tips and leaves them especially susceptible to extra current flow..... always wet or moist from eating pickles while working fixing tvs...... slopping the cabinets up with pickle juice, maybe customers know him around town as the pickle guy that fixes tv's, maybe he already has bad health, heart problems...... Likable guy as a tv repairman but customers know they have to clean the cabinet when they get their set back. He always talks about intricate circuits to his board unhappy wife, who recounts those stories to her secret lover until the day when her lover can't take it anymore and electrocutes her husband at work with a rigged tv he brings to the shop with a particular fault exasperated by a story the tv repairman himself complained to his wife about as one of the most dangerous designs ever to be let loose on the public! you really can make up yer own details.... Hell you can use that design from Zenith with the 4 wire white capacitor that doubles the HV and cuts the neck off crt's who cares the zenith 4 wire cap only makes sense to a few people on the planet anyway..... Look at Seinfeld remember that episode with Jerry's car and Puddy was not going to work on it and they were talking in Jerry's apartment about what the guy tells you is really wrong with it... "Hey it needs a new Johnson rod" Does it matter that cars, even SAAB's made not from jets don't have Johnson Rods.... Nope it was still funny.... The less real details the better...... Its better if you let the tv repairman complain to his wife about the thing that will later kill him, that way the character explains why it kills him, and validates the story... Now to make up for this I'm going to misspell a lot of words and use google as a verb in several future posts.... Hey let the guy get killed by the VU tuning meter on his vintage 1948 GE color tv he took in to have repaired..... No one off this board is going to know what's wrong with that...... Make it a good Columbo kinda killing.... My favorite was the murder with the turntable and the umbrella up the chimney with the fire crackers in it to cover up the murder that had taken place earlier.... It was the best!
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  #20  
Old 10-05-2011, 08:51 PM
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Thanks, Squirrel Boy. I'm not sure I follow all you're saying, since I'm not a teevee hobbyist (just someone picking your brains), but what you wrote sounds good. I'm actually trying to get a feel for what I can do with an old teevee before I commit to a plot. I have a working plot now. The guy is sixty but not sloppy. Looks like Paul Newman, in fact. Not married. There'll be a love interest in there. I've decided to go romantic in this book. There is someone I want killed off. She'll have a gun on my guy, who'll be tied up. He's instructing her how to fix the teevee reception in the underground bomb shelter and meet her maker there. It's just a matter now of using the correct terminology to get her zapped. That would be the tidiest death, I think.

One thing I'm not sure about when it comes to electrocution. She gets electrocuted but how does she get unelectrocuted? Does she get zapped and the current goes away and she falls? Or does she sizzles until...until what happens?
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  #21  
Old 10-05-2011, 10:21 PM
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If she is to be killed by the electric:
-she could be on a ladder, chair, whatever, and when she dies she could fall backward
-there is a good chance that a fuse would blow in the TV (or in the bunkers fuse box). If it is a battery powered set, it would be the fuse in the TV. Also, with a battery set, most of the voltages are pretty low but the high voltage would still be rather sharp. Probably still too low to kill a healthy person. You will read plenty of old stories (on here and elsewhere) about hapless TV repairmen (and wannabe TV repairmen) getting zapped by the high voltage. Most will describe being thrown back, away from the set. The typical injuries in that case are not from the shock but from what they physically hit. So, she is up on the ladder that leads out of the fallout shelter, balancing that TV with one hand, he has her reach in with a pocket knife to "make an adjustment" and gets zapped by 10,000 volts. Doesn't kill her, but certainly would knock her off that ladder, backwards 10' onto that cement floor.
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  #22  
Old 10-06-2011, 04:14 PM
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bare feet

No, it's very easy, the sink up stairs starts to leak, so the person goes into the basement , on bare feet to check out how much water is on the cement floor. The TV in the basement spare room was still on,, so-oooo the guy walks over to turn the TV off that has a broken knob, actually it just has the steel shaft, were the knob was.
So being on bare feet on the wet cement floor and the bare steel shaft, and lets hope that the TV has a live chassis, the person get electrocuted.

Very simple and realistic, I think.

Last edited by HiFiCanada; 10-06-2011 at 04:17 PM.
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  #23  
Old 10-06-2011, 05:14 PM
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I'm sure that scenereo has claimed a life at some point.

One other one that would be real wild is that most electrolytics were mounted such that if they blew they would hit the CRT. You could have a lytic blowup and cause the CRT to implode a large shard severing the jugular of the lady who would probably be close enough for the chances of that hapening to be good. It would also be a means of escape for the repair guy as he could slink up to a sizeable shard grab it and use it to cut the ropes.
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  #24  
Old 10-07-2011, 02:12 AM
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Vivian-

Your plot proposal reminds me of (I think) an Alfred Hitchcock or Ellery Queen short story I read years ago about a man who was murdered by tinkering with his shortwave radio. The murderer knew the victim used his radio with one hand on the volume or RF gain knob and one hand on the tuning knob, so the killer replaced the two knobs with all-metal knobs from the curtain rod in the same room and then ran high voltage wires to each of the two knobs. As soon as the victim did his hold-the-knobs routine, he was dead.
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  #25  
Old 10-09-2011, 08:02 PM
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venivdvici venivdvici is offline
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I like that "get zapped, get thrown, and get dead" idea. That could work quite nicely. Thanks!
Quote:
Originally Posted by bgadow View Post
If she is to be killed by the electric:
-she could be on a ladder, chair, whatever, and when she dies she could fall backward
-there is a good chance that a fuse would blow in the TV (or in the bunkers fuse box). If it is a battery powered set, it would be the fuse in the TV. Also, with a battery set, most of the voltages are pretty low but the high voltage would still be rather sharp. Probably still too low to kill a healthy person. You will read plenty of old stories (on here and elsewhere) about hapless TV repairmen (and wannabe TV repairmen) getting zapped by the high voltage. Most will describe being thrown back, away from the set. The typical injuries in that case are not from the shock but from what they physically hit. So, she is up on the ladder that leads out of the fallout shelter, balancing that TV with one hand, he has her reach in with a pocket knife to "make an adjustment" and gets zapped by 10,000 volts. Doesn't kill her, but certainly would knock her off that ladder, backwards 10' onto that cement floor.
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  #26  
Old 10-09-2011, 08:09 PM
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What a cool story!

Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisW6ATV View Post
Vivian-

Your plot proposal reminds me of (I think) an Alfred Hitchcock or Ellery Queen short story I read years ago about a man who was murdered by tinkering with his shortwave radio. The murderer knew the victim used his radio with one hand on the volume or RF gain knob and one hand on the tuning knob, so the killer replaced the two knobs with all-metal knobs from the curtain rod in the same room and then ran high voltage wires to each of the two knobs. As soon as the victim did his hold-the-knobs routine, he was dead.
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